The museum's small collection has at its core the lesser-told stories of Indianapolis' history and its connection to African-American music, as well more general themes of Afrofuturism, says Michael Kaufmann, its founding director. It hits the lofty note, too, of the music of the spheres—there are planets hanging from the ceiling and it's named after the sound of breath and the sound of mind.
The museum is located in Indianapolis' Fountain Square neighborhood, in the Murphy Building; to reach the museum, you enter into what looks like a very small record store and pass through a heavy red curtain, inspired by the one in a portrait of Charles Willson Peale, the early American painter and collector. Past the curtain is a warmly lit space, just 11 by 10 feet. The display case are made largely from old musical instruments; the collection includes "currencies of amusements and fallen empires," like the Soviet Union, an ashtray from the Burger King where Elvis was spotted after his death, and samples of dirt from venerated places, including religious pilgrimage sites, places where UFOs were spotted, and the arena where Elvis gave his last performance. There's also music—the 4th dimension—commissioned for the museum; one piece is inspired by Scapper Blackwell, a blues guitarist who recorded and was killed in Indianapolis.
The main attraction, though, is the Parliament Funkadelic Baby Mothership, a prop from the group's road show. The Baby Mothership flew over approximately 300 audiences: it would appear to land on stage, and the big Mothership would appear, from which George Clinton would emerge. The Parliament Funkadelic road manager Tom Battista is an Indianapolis native, and he and his family were responsible for creating the show's props. When Kaufmann found out the Baby Mothership was still around, he thought: "That’s too awesome to just have it in storage. We should put it on display and celebrate it." He had been thinking for a long time about creating a wunderkammer of some kind and recruited artist Kipp Normand as the curator and designer of the project.
The Museum of Psychphonics isn't the sort of place with long, explanatory panels. There's a pamphlet that visitors can take, but it's designed to be read after a visit. "The didactic information is pretty limited," says Kaufmann. "The museumasks more questions than it provides answers."
A marriage over the blacksmith's anvil in Gretna Green, Scotland. (Photo: Keystone-France/ Gamma-Rapho/ Getty Images)
Love in 18th century England wasn’t the private affair we think of today. When a couple wanted to marry, they not only needed official permission from their parents, but social approval from their whole town. For many English citizens of the era, the only way to live with their sweethearts was to elope in a runaway marriage. Thousands such couples had secret weddings in Scottish border towns each year until the 1940s, often in a decidedly un-romantic venue: the sweaty, stifling shop of the local blacksmith. These ceremonies were known as “anvil weddings.”
Today, most historians agree that fishermen, weavers, and horse saddlers performed most runaway 18th-century weddings rather than blacksmiths, who were highly valued and paid for their trade. “The ‘blacksmith’ is a myth,” English travel writer Charles George Harper wrote in 1907, “deriving no doubt from the more or less poetic idea of indissoluble bonds being forged.”
Yet weddings believed to be unofficial have been referred to as “blacksmith weddings” since the 1500s, and in 1843, a blacksmith from the Scottish border town of Gretna Green wrote to the London Times, asserting that he had performed more than 3,500 weddings.
An 1844 depiction of a wedding at Gretna Green in Scotland, with a blacksmith's anvil and horseshoes on the wall. (Photo: British Library/Public Domain)
Regardless of who generally performed them, the anvil wedding’s appeal exploded in the 1700s. At the time, English bureaucrats were unsettled by a growing number of marriages done without paperwork, a priest or public license. So the government made written parental permission a legal requirement for young couples, with the Marriage Act of 1753 (full title: An Act for the Better Preventing of Clandestine Marriage).
Under this act non-royal English citizens under 21 couldn’t get married without signed permission from their parents, and had to publicly announce the marriage in their town so others could object if need be. Scotland, on the other hand, had very different laws: girls over 12 and boys over 14 could get married by “declaration,” meaning they only had to announce vows in front of witnesses. Parental permission was not required.
Scottish law allowed any citizen to perform a marriage, and anyone else present to bear witness. Gretna Green innkeeper Thomas Little, who performed weddings in his inn, the Maxwell Arms, is thought to have been the first to capitalize on the legal differences between the two countries, inventing the concept of the “Gretna Wedding.”
Many runway weddings were performed in inns or public buildings, but another central town fixture also played a chief role: blacksmith cottages, near where the blacksmith made the couple’s rings. Perhaps the most popular blacksmith’s shop for marriages at the time was the smithy of the Scottish estate Gretna Green, conveniently located less than a mile from the border with England, near the River Esk.
Gretna Green became so famous for runaway weddings, that today it is known for little else. Moonlighting priests collected a small fee for their services; the fee sometimes included a room for couples who wanted to consummate the marriage bond straight away. In general, these “anvil weddings” were seen as disreputable, yet very romantic. The “priest,” who had no formal qualifications to lead the wedding, would conclude the marriage ceremony by pounding the anvil in the blacksmith’s shop, symbolically joining the couple the way a blacksmith joins metal.
Runaway weddings were flooded with young lovers and high-status couples who wanted privacy. But anvil weddings were not always forged from pure romance; kidnapped brides were forced to marry at Gretna Green and other border towns, too. One kidnapping that made headlines was “The Shrigley Abduction,” in which the 15-year-old heiress Ellen Turner was captured and coerced into a Gretna Green anvil wedding by 30-year-old Edward Wakefield and his team of accomplices, in order to access her funds (after a court case, the marriage was annulled).
It may not have been common for blacksmiths to conduct anvil wedding ceremonies, but near the turn of the 20th century, entrepreneur Hugh Mackie and his employee Richard Rennison brought the legend to life. In 1890, Hugh Mackie bought Gretna Green and worked as an "anvil priest" (along with his wife), uniting couples by striking his anvil and announcing, “Right-o! Carry on.” When Mackie retired in 1926, Richard Rennison became the blacksmith priest until 1940, when wedding by declaration was outlawed and the authenticity of these marriages were questioned.
Richard Rennison performed more than 5,000 marriages over his blacksmith anvil, some of which were contested but upheld decades later in court. The anvil became so popular some people even threatened to steal it. The popularity of runaway weddings also surged in other Scottish border towns, including toll houses in Lamberton, and Coldstream, where cobblers and “mole catchers” who doubled as priests competed with Gretna Green.
Sometimes it was possible to get married by an actual minister: the coastal village of Portpatrick was home to a minister who ignored Scotland’s marriage law residency requirements in order to wed passengers arriving on a daily ferry route from Northern Ireland. Couples were able to hop off the boat onto land, get married in less than an hour, and then ride the ferry back home in a single day.
In 1856 residency requirements for Scottish weddings put a halt to these marriage ceremonies, naming them invalid unless one member of the couple resided in Scotland (this requirement was removed in 1977). But the difference between the marital laws in Scotland and England still remains: the age of full marriage consent in England is 18, and in Scotland, it’s 16.
Yet the romance of running away to start a new life after a secret wedding at the border has hardly faded. These days couples in both countries have to get a license to make it official, though they can still relive the fantasy of getting married over the anvil.
Like a Scottish Las Vegas, Gretna Green has attracted modern tourists and lovers to its wedding ceremonies for the last few decades, and the blacksmith shop still marries around 1,000 couples per year.
This past summer, paleontologists from Siberia's Tomsk State University took a pilgrimage to Mamontovoye Village, armed with picks and shovels. They carried out their planned dig, finding a typical array of interesting bones.
Just as they were about to leave for home, they figured they'd dig just a little deeper. And then they hit the jackpot: the densest mammoth graveyard ever found.
"We went further down in one location, and then another," Sergey Leshchinsky, a Tomsk State University professor and the leader of the dig, told the Siberian Times. "As we went deeper, we found [a] concentration of mammoth bones that we never had before."
Mamontovoye Villageis a well-known mammoth hotspot. Locals regularly unearth bones while installing new pipes or digging up potato fields, and "Mamontovoye" is Russian for "Mammoth." But this latest haul is unique for the long slice of history it provides.
The bones were diverse, with limbs, ribs and vertebrae all piled together, and they were "incredibly well-preserved," Leshchinsky says. Excavators found as many as 100 bones within three feet of each other. In addition, remains of mammoths from about 10,000 years ago were layered on top of even older ones, from about 30,000 years ago. Older mammoths were about twice as big as the more recent ones.
Besides the mass of mammoths, researchers also found bones from horses, bison, and smaller animals—potentially prehistoric foxes and rodents, some of which had been chewed on by larger predators.
More riches likely lie in store. But the paleontologists resisted the urge to dig further—for now. "We would never have returned from Mamontovoye in [that] case," says Leshchinsky.
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.
The Mathematikum is a museum where visitors are invited to understand mathematics over 170 hands-on, math-related exhibits. Guests can solve puzzles, build bridges, make music, stand inside soap bubbles, embody the golden ratio, contemplate infinity, and more, all throughout the three floors of this 1200 sqm (13,000 sqft) museum.
Founded by German mathematician Albrecht Beutelspacher, the concept of the Mathematikum began with a seminar on geometric models taught by Beutelspacher at the University of Giessen. In 1994 he started holding public exhibitions of the models his students created to demonstrate, in concrete form or observable action, various abstract mathematical concepts. These annual shows grew in size and popularity, transforming into a travelling show in 1998 that toured domestically and internationally. Beutelspacher's innovative math exhibitions finally found a permanent home with the opening of the Mathematikum on November 19th, 2002.
The goal of the Mathematikum is to open a new door to mathematics for people of all ages and educational backgrounds. Rather than discussing math using symbols, equations, or formulas, the Mathematikum relies on sensory experiences to make sense of the ideas that underpin many of math's key insights. For example, the special properties of soap are explored by standing inside a giant soap bubble. Visitors can produce figures or replicate geometric bodies with mirrors, build a so-called "Leonardo Bridge" from wooden slats, experience pi spatially, and see time in the form of a tree calendar. Through these puzzles and experiments, complex mathematical concepts are unconsciously, easily and understandably communicated.
In 2009, the Mini-Mathematikum was added to the permanent collection; this section is aimed primarily at children from four to eight years old. and examines basic topics of mathematics, such as numbers, shapes and patterns. The Mathematikum also continues to stage travelling exhibitions worldwide and helps develop exhibits for other science museums.
There is an old lead mine in the Peak District National Park of central England, just outside of the town of Castleton. Known as the Odin Mine, it’s surrounded by the most exquisite pastoral landscapes. Nestled in the countryside near the mine’s entrance is this contraption, known as a crushing circle.
Although the mine itself may be as old as the Roman era (opinions on its age differ), the crushing circle wasn’t constructed until 1823. These systems were commonly used in metal mining at the time, a somewhat crude—yet very effective—method of extracting the valuable metals from the rest of the junky ore.
The way it worked was simple—a heavy stone was carved round, and bound in iron. It was then pulled around a ring of iron by a horse, as ore was fed under the stone. The ore was pulverized by the weight, and the pressing of iron against iron would separate the elements of the raw material, allowing for the smelting of the metals.
The Odin Mine is quite deep, at one time extending nearly a third of a mile into the hillside. It hasn’t been active since the early 20th century, and what remains of the cavern is now unstable and prone to dangerous collapse. You can still see the entrance, but investigating further in is not advised.
Around the site you’ll also find a range of plants, called metallophytes, that have evolved to tolerate the lead and other heavy metals in the soil. Some metallophyes actually require the lead to flower. Talk about lemonade from lemons.
Although she was born as Norma Jean Baker, she was buried as Marilyn Monroe. And although her final resting place was intended to be modest and private, the power of her popularity continues to draw fans and fellow celebrities alike, even after her—and their—demise.
After dying of a drug overdose in what was an apparent suicide on August 5, 1962, Marilyn Monroe was interred three days later at Westwood Village Memorial Cemetery. The funeral arrangements were handled by Joe DiMaggio, whose famous romance with Monroe (which ended in divorce after a brief marriage in 1954) had reportedly been rekindled shortly before her death.
Feeling some resentment toward the entertainment industry for Monroe's demise, DiMaggio had no interest in making the funeral a Hollywood affair. Westwood was, at a the time, a quiet, out-of-the-way cemetery chosen because it was also the final resting place of Monroe's childhood guardian, Grace Goddard, and her surrogate mother Ana Lower. The private service was restricted to a small group of the star's closest friends and associates.
Ironically, thanks to the presence of Marilyn Monroe's grave, Westwood has been a popular place for celebrity burials ever since. Other famous grave sites in the cemetery include those of Dean Martin, Jack Lemmon, Rodney Dangerfield, Roy Orbison, Frank Zappa, Truman Capote, Ray Bradbury, and Billy Wilder, to name but a few. It will one day also be the final resting place of Hugh Hefner, who bought the tomb next to Monroe's in 1992 so that he could spend eternity alongside Playboy's first Playmate.
Marilyn Monroe's earthly remains are interred in crypt number 24 in the Corridor of Memories, a complex of above-ground crypts on the west side of the cemetery. For 20 years after her death, DiMaggio had red roses delivered to her simple grave three times a week. Today, it is regularly adorned with flowers, cards, letters, and other mementos left by the regular visitors it attracts. Memorial services are held annually on June 1 (her birthday) and August 5 (the date of her death). Monroe's crypt is easily distinguishable from the others in the wall thanks to the discoloration caused by lipstick marks frequently left by fans.
Born in the late 1870s, England, Aleister Crowley was one of the great characters of the 20th century—a poet, a magician, a journalist, an alchemist, a philosopher, a spy, a self-affirmed drug fiend, and a sex addict. He was also known as "The Great Beast" and the "wickedest man in the world." He played a major role in the creation of alternate religions like Wicca, the A∴A∴, and the Ordo Templi Orientis, and he founded the Order of Thelema, a semi-Satanic cult whose famous edict was "do what thou wilt."
Crowley is to the occult as Tolkien is to fantasy—he set the stage that everyone else plays in. Basically, if you're dabbling in things dark and dastardly, Aleister was probably there first.
In all of his doings, Crowley traveled a lot. He pursued exploits in Egypt, India, the Far East, Australia, all over Europe and North America, dotting the map with sex magick and weird stunts. Here are a six places in the Atlas where the infamous occultist left his mark.
Blythe Road, the former site of the London temple of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. (Photo: Philip Perry/CC BY-SA 2.0)
Though he was interested in the occult from childhood, Crowley's first foray into organized magic (or "magick," as he preferred to spell it) was with the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Well liked by its co-founder, Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers, Crowley advanced in the ranks very quickly. However, not everyone was a fan. The London chapter, which had already found faults in Mathers' leadership, particularly disavowed him for the eccentric, bisexual Crowley. This caused a decisive rift between two factions of the Order, but Mathers wasn't ready to concede his leadership.
In 1900, while the poet and London chapter leader W. B. Yeats was heading a meeting, he was attacked by an "astral siege" from none other than Aleister Crowley. Crowley, wearing a black Osiris mask and a kilt, and his mistress burst into the temple, casting spells and brandishing daggers. They intended to take the temple for Mathers', but were unsuccessful. The police came, the scuffle went to court, and the London chapter of the Golden Dawn won (as they paid the rent on the space). Now the nondescript George's Cafe resides in the former site of the secret society's temple, with no indication of its former life.
Boleskine House was steeped in darkness long before Crowley moved in. The manor is allegedly built atop the ruins of a 10th century church that burnt to the ground during a service, killing all the congregants inside. Crowley bought Boleskine House to seclude himself and perform magic from The Book of Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage. It was during this period that Crowley became famous for his occultism and black magic, both around the Scotland and later, the world. Sometime during this period Mathers called Crowley to Paris. He left without dispelling the "12 Kings and Dukes of Hell" he had summoned, and many locals blame the house's unlucky history on evil spirits left behind.
First, Crowley's housekeeper's two children died mysteriously and abruptly. Crowley also bragged that one employee of the estate who had long abstained from alcohol got drunk and attempted to murder his entire family. After the house had changed hands, it still wasn't free of dark energy. In 1965, the army major who owned the house committed suicide by shotgun. The next owner, Led Zeppelin's Jimmy Page, spent very little time at the estate, instead bequeathing it to a friend who didn't mind the unexplained creaks, groans, and various ghostly apparitions, but was bothered by the Crowley and Page fans who frequently attempted to break into the house and defile the grounds. Later owners dismissed any notions of hauntings or witchcraft at the house, but in 2015, the residents returned from a shopping trip to find the house completely in flames.
Evangeline Adams' New Hampshire home, where Aleister Crowley spent his magickal retirement. (Photo: Courtesy of J.W. Ocker)
In 1916, Crowley spent four months at the home of renowned medium Evangeline Adams in what he called a "magickal retirement." This didn't mean taking a break from cocaine, heroin, sex magick, and prolonged rituals. Quite the opposite in fact. In Hebron, Crowley doubled down and did a great deal of writing, poetry and magical instruction alike. He was even a ghost writer on several of Adams' books of astrology.
In another magickal retreat, Crowley spent 40 days and 40 nights (a la Jesus Christ) on a tiny island in the Hudson River. His mission was translating the Tao Te Ching, a 4th century Chinese philosophical text. He hadn't brought much food but had packed plenty of red paint, and also put himself to work painting Thelemic graffiti on the island's rocks. Curious families watching the bald, robed man on the island from the banks of the Hudson began bringing him rations. He was also visited by fans and artists, who brought him food, drugs, and company.
Much later Crowley reported experiencing visions of his past lives during his stay on Esopus Island, all of which were somehow very influential figures. His former selves included legendary Taoist Ge Xuan, Renaissance Pope Alexander VI, alchemist Alessandro Cagliostro, and the magician Eliphas Levi. Today, the island is open to the public so long as they can reach it by boat. There are even camping amenities for those who wish to follow in the footsteps of the infamous occultist.
Any eccentric worth his salt has to fake his own death at least once. When visiting Portugal in 1930 and feeling annoyed by his current mistress, Crowley gave appearance he had committed suicide at the Boca de Inferno ("Mouth of Hell") caves. His friend, poet Fernando Pessoa handed Crowley's suicide note to newspapers, helpfully explaining the magical symbols and translating the mangled Portuguese to police and media alike. Three weeks later, Crowley reappeared at the opening of an exhibition of his works in a Berlin gallery, suggesting this whole affair was more publicity stunt than anything else. Today, there is a small white plaque mounted on the rock provides the text of Crowley's note: "Não Posso Viver Sem Ti. A outra 'Boca De Infierno' apanhar-me-á não será tão quente como a tua," which translates roughly to "Can't live without you. The other mouth of hell that will catch me won't be as hot as yours." That might be touching if any of it were genuine.
Crowley's magickal career came to its peak in a little Sicilian town. For a small amount of money, he, his two lovers, their small children, and miscellaneous followers moved into one story house facing the Mediterranean sea. They called it the Abbey of Thelema. The common room was dedicated to ritual practices and held a scarlet "magick" circle marked with the sign of the major Thelemic deities. Crowley’s own bedroom, labeled by himself as "la chambre des cauchemars" (or "the room of nightmares") was entirely hand-painted by the occultist with explicitly erotic frescos, hermaphroditic goblins, and vividly colored monsters. This private room was used for specific night initiations involving psychoactive drugs which gave terrifying cinematic life to this Bosch-like vision of hellish debauchery.
Crowley considered his temple a school of magick, and gave it an appropriately collegiate motto: "Collegium ad Spiritum Sanctum"—"A College towards the Holy Spirit." The Cefalù period was one of the most prolific and happy of his life, even as he suffered from drug addiction and had to write the scandalous Diary of a Drug Fiend to finance his community. The growing interest in dark magic and the occult provided him with an ample student body (pun intended). But in 1922, the experience in monasticism ended when Raoul Loveday, a young disciple, tragically died from typhoid fever contracted from drinking contaminated spring water, though Loveday's wife maintained it was from drinking cat's blood.
Crowley and his people were evicted by Mussolini's regime in 1923. The dictator had no sympathy for pornographic art or mysticism. Once the Abbey closed, the villagers whitewashed the murals, which they somewhat correctly saw as demonic. This erased much of the history and work of Crowley in Cefalù. The Abbey of Thelema is still there, a hidden monument of mysterious, magickal decay.
The earliest version we have of the Bible, as we read it today, is called the Codex Amiatinus, which dates to the 8th century and sits in a library in Florence. Before that, all we have are fragments: stray books, scrolls and various other versions of the book.
But researchers in Israel, using a new scanning technology, recently uncovered a portion of the book of Leviticus that is, in fact, pretty much the same version we read today, according to the Associated Press. And the portion—found on a charred bit of a scroll that had been sitting in an archaeologist's storeroom for decades—dates to over 2,000 years ago, or right around the time of Jesus.
This squares with what many experts have long felt, that the modern Bible is indeed that old. But this is the first time researchers have actually found proof.
"This is quite amazing for us," Dead Sea scroll scholar Emmanuel Tov told the AP. "In 2,000 years, this text has not changed."
The researchers unveiled their findings in a study published Wednesday in Science Advances, proving among other things, that the book we read today is about as antiquated as we thought.
You would never guess that just outside quaint Dover Plains, New York lies an isolated makeshift village about which little is known aside from some derisive rumors. Oniontown remains a mystery—which is probably what its residents would prefer.
The name may have came from the onion fields surrounding the little town; 19th century tenant farmers made their meager living working in these fields. It also might be a derivative of "Youngintown," a name deriding the number of children born to poor families in the mountainside settlement. It also might just be a plain old insult, equating the residents' smell and appeal to that of an onion. Whatever its origins, Oniontown's name, much like the rest of the village, is both cemented in tradition and shrouded in mystery.
The derision for its settlers is almost as old as Oniontown itself. The community, which has historically been made up of poor whites, is incorporated into Dutchess County. Oniontown children in Dover Plains public schools have always been bullied for their origins, often leading to fights and even incarceration. In the 1940s an International News Service reporter wrote a series of articles on the "Hillbillies of Colony, Century Behind Times." At that point Oniontown still did not have electricity. Today, most of its residents work menial labor or farm, based on the many pigs and chickens seen along Onion Road. They still live in extreme isolation though—the post office doesn't cross the train tracks to deliver to Oniontown, and because garbage removal services aren't offered to the community, trash is either burned or strewn across the woods.
Oniontown gained national attention when a group of teenagers filmed their foray into the town. Ignoring the signs reading "KEEP OUT" and "NO TRESPASSING," they drove up the unpaved road through a series of broken-down trailers and ramshackle sheds. They gawked at people on their porches and mocked the impoverished rural atmosphere, all while dramatically predicting their own deaths at the hands of "inbred hillbillies." The video went viral and prompted more local teenagers to film themselves trespassing in Oniontown.
Some of the copycats didn't leave unscathed. Oniontown residents launched retaliatory attacks on the intruders, beating them up and smashing their car windows. Sometimes they were even shot at. The violence escalated to the point that Dutchess County police requested that Google remove several of the videos and set up a roadblock near the entrance to Onion Road.
Following these incidents Oniontown's reputation, which had previously only been Hudson Valley lore, spread around the world: Oniontowners were inbred; police wouldn't go to Oniontown; everyone there was a drug dealer. VICE wrote an expose. National Geographic produced a series called American Fringe, one episode of which probed into the lives of Oniontowners (with some dramatic reenactment). Though many of these articles and videos attempted to dispel myths about the settlement, they introduced Oniontown as a community outside the law where the inhabitants were "a different kind of human." It's often left unclear whether that is meant literally or figuratively.
In reality, Oniontown is likely just an isolated, impoverished community that has been intruded upon too many times, only causing it to retreat further. The intimidation factor of the mythos surrounding them, however negative, works to their advantage in this regard. Despite much conjecture about little village on the internet, Oniontowners have mostly remained silent. It seems they do truly just want to be left alone.
On sandy beaches in Australia, Thailand, and other regions of the Indo-Pacific, you may stumble across these strange star-like patterns in the sand. Tunneling their way up through the surface after the tides recede, sand bubbler crabs emerge from their damp, grainy dens and quickly transform a smooth, picturesque beach into a plain of sandy pellets.
In the time-lapse video, the cute globular crabs raid a beach in Koh Lanta, Thailand. The sand bubbler crabs look like they are infesting the beach as they uplift the terrain, but the tiny crustaceans are actually harmless. Measuring about just a centimeter across, sand bubbler crabs can cover an entire beach in little sand balls within just a couple of hours after a tide retreats. The radial formations left behind have been described as “sand ball flowers” and “sand ball galaxies”—pieces of art.
Their odd bubble-shaped bodies, and two projecting eyes gave the sand bubbler crab, species Scopimera inflata, its name. The crabs easily blend in to the environment, as their exterior matches the shade of the sand, and have claws perfect for digging and sifting through grains.
During low tide, a sand bubbler crab will poke out from the mouth of a burrow, surveying the beach to make sure it’s safe to emerge. Then, it will clear the sand surrounding the burrow by pushing it with its legs. When satisfied, the sand bubbler crabs will began their sandy feast. They will scrape the surface of the sand by alternating their claws, spooning it into the mouth to filter and consume microanimals. The crabs will then rotate and form a little pellet of residue sand, and kick it off to the side with their legs.
You can see Malaysian sand bubbler crabs create the slimy balls of sand up close in the clip below filmed by Matthew Davidson.
These crabs are crafty in more ways than one. Males will also perform a funny dancing display to show others their dominance over the territory. They straighten their legs, stand tall, and stretch their claws high above the body. Then they'll pull all their limbs back in quickly to go into attack-mode stance.
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.
18th century naturalist William Bartram named a swath of land in Northwest Florida "Manatee Springs" because he spotted a manatee carcass along the shores of the Suwannee River there. Now a state park, Manatee Springs lives up to its name, not with dead manatees, but with live ones.
Manatees swim into the Gulf of Mexico and into Florida's many springs in search of warmer climes during the winter months. The water in the springs remains a balmy 72º F, making them the perfect place for manatees to wait out the winter. The river bottom is covered in grassy kelp, a manatee's favorite dish. Other native animals include the largemouth bass and speckled perch, as well as the odd alligator.
The Springs were designated a state park in 1971. Swimming is allowed during summer, but prohibited in winter to allow the manatees space and shelter. Kayaking is allowed year-round however, and manatees, who are notoriously un-shy, are known to swim up to the boats and allow kayakers to pet them. Lucky visitors may even spot a baby manatee or two, as the warm waters double as a nursery during calving months.
Zhangjiajie National Forest Park is full of natural wonders that draw thousands of visitors a day, from misty forests to towering sandstone pillars. Allegedly, its landscape even inspired the scenery of James Cameron's Avatar. But it's not rock formations or trees that tourists have been flocking for lately–it's a bridge. A 1,400-foot-long, 900-foot-high bridge made out of glass.
This bridge, opened in the summer of 2016, comes as part of a trend in glass suspension structures. There's "Brave Men's Bridge", located in the same natural preserve as the Zhangjiajie bridge, as well as a swath of other Chinese glass bridges in both urban and natural settings. All of these have been constructed within a decade of each other, each trumping the last in superlatives. The Zhangjiajie glass bridge currently holds the record as both the longest and the highest in the world. The appeal of these attractions is both the ability to see the natural landscape below one's feet and the element of fear inherent in walking on such a massive structure made of delicate material.
As if that wasn't enough to terrify, one of China's other glass walkways cracked under the feet of visitors just two weeks after its opening. Though authorities assured the public the crack in the glass was merely superficial and no one was in any danger, it's understandable why people were scared. When the Zhangjiajie bridge was unveiled, a number of publicity events were staged to prove the bridge's sturdiness, including driving a car across it and whacking the inches-thick glass panes with sledgehammers. The bridge stood the test, but to ensure safety only 600-800 people are allowed to partake in its glass wonder at any given time.
There's a moment in Underground Airlines, Ben Winters' novel of an alternate history in which slavery in America was never abolished, when the protagonist has no choice but to go physically underground. An escaped slave who becomes a slave catcher after his own capture, he is hunting another, and the search leads him to a creek running under Indianapolis. It's called Pogue's Run, and it was buried because it didn't fit into the design of the city.
Pogue's Run is real. It runs under Indianapolis for two-and-a-half miles, and it's possible to walk from one end to another. All underground streams have a mystery about them, but Pogue's Run has a more ghostly history than most. Its story begins with one of Indianapolis’ first white settlers, whose disappearance has never been solved, and a Scottish-born city planner with a tidy vision.
George Pogue arrived on the banks of Pogue's Run in 1819, with a wife, seven children, and a herd of horses. Back then, the stream was called Perkins' Run, after another white settler who'd lived there briefly. One morning, after some of his horses had disappeared, Pogue took off after a Native American man who’d come by the farm: Pogue thought he might know who had taken the horses. That was the last time anyone reported seeing Pogue; though settlers sent out search parties, they never found his body. He had disappeared, just two years after he moved to the area. His name stayed, though; that stream was now called Pogue’s Run.
Not far from Pogue's cabin was the site that Indiana's newly organized General Assembly had picked, in 1820, for the capital of the four-year-old state. The assembly drew up a scheme for the new city, an elegant design that echoed Washington D.C's: Indianapolis would be a square grid, a mile on each side, with a circular plaza in the center and four wide, stately boulevards radiating out towards each of the square’s corners. Except—in the southeast corner of the city, the gridded blocks tilted, askew. There was a black line snaking through the plan, throwing the grid off kilter. That was Pogue's Run, ruining the city's planned symmetry.
In the 19th century, as Indianapolis grew into and out of the original Mile Square plan, Pogue's Run troubled the city. In the rainy seasons, it would overflow its banks, flooding streets and damaging property. And as sewers dumped their contents into the water, the run became one of the city's most polluted waterways. Eventually, city planners decided they'd had enough. By 1905, they were planning a “straightjacket” for the stream, to keep its water contained, and in 1915, they trapped the run underground.
On the newly open space, the city built its train station, its football stadium, and its highways. Like George Pogue, Pogue's Run disappeared, and after a few decades, no one thought much about the creek running underneath downtown Indianapolis.
Indianapolis is not the kind of city that has a lot of big, built up myths—the White River does not define the city in the way that the Charles River defines Boston, or the Potomac defines D.C. But Pogue’s Run, in its obscurity and weirdness, has in the past decade or so become a piece of history that people want to preserve and hold onto. There’s now a Pogue’s Run Grocer, a co-operatively run store, and a Pogue’s Run porter, made by a local brewery.
Yet the story of the stream's namesake is still murky; in the two centuries since George Pogue's disappearance, no one has come up with a definitive ending. Every few decades, when unclaimed human bones turn up, there's speculation that they might be Pogue's. But most people presume he was killed by Native Americans, and that no one will ever know exactly where or how he died.
Inside the pitch-black tunnel built more than a century ago, the water can be deep, or, depending on the rainfall, can slow to almost nothing, leaving dry concrete pathways on either side. The entrance is wide and intimidating. The walls are made from concrete, and just inside, the tunnel looks like a bunker built on an alien world, where a trusty blaster would come in handy. Walk some 200 yards deeper in, and the light is gone, ceding to total blackness.
The ceiling is cracked, and side tunnels, made of brick, occasionally branch off the main route. Cell phones don't get service in the tunnel; the only way to get a sense of your location is to turn down one of those side tunnels, find a grate that cracks up into the city, stick a phone out of it, and take a picture. Then, all of a sudden, the tunnel ends, and the water pours out on the other side of town, into the White River.
Plaza de la Raza at Columbus Park, otherwise known as La Raza Park. (Photo: Kevin J. Beaty/Denverite)
A version of this piece originally appeared on Denverite, a newsletter and news site for Denver newcomers, know-it-alls and everybody in between. This story was written by Erica Meltzer.
Eduardo Lucero was working the burrito stand with his very pregnant wife and 12-year-old son the day things came to a head.
“I looked over to my left and saw a wedge formation of police,” he said. “And I told my wife, ‘They’re going to get us.’ And I looked to the right and saw another wedge. I said, ‘It’s a pincer move.'”
On a summer day in 1981, Denver police were clearing people out of the park because this event — the annual commemoration of the community’s takeover of the park back in 1970 — didn’t have a permit. It would turn into a day and night of tear gas and dogs, bricks and bottles, beatings and arrests.
Within a few years, the city closed the park’s pool forever, filled it in, covered it up, and the community lost something it would never get back.
This is a “The past is never dead. It’s not even past” story.
It’s a story about a green city block on West 38th Avenue between Navajo and Osage streets that was at the center of Denver’s Chicano movement in the 1970s.
Just about anyone around there will tell you the name of the park is La Raza Park, but the sign says Columbus Park. That’s part of this story too.
The park was named Columbus in recognition of the Italian-American community that dominated the neighborhood for decades. The restaurants along 38th and the park name are some of the last remnants of Denver’s Little Italy.
Mexican-Americans have also lived in the neighborhood for a long time, but by the 1960s, they had overtaken the Italians. As their numbers increased, their political power and sense of themselves also changed. People began to organize around educational disparities, around the lack of job opportunities, around the killings by police of unarmed young men in the community.
Corky Gonzalez founded the Crusade for Justice in Denver in 1966. That the community should have control of the institutions — the schools and parks and community centers — that serve it was an important tenet of the Crusade for Justice and the broader Chicano movement, and it was implemented in La Raza Park.
Former boxer Rodolfo (Corky) Gonzales, right, with Cesar Chavez, formed the Crusade for Justice in 1966. (Photo: KRMA/Denver Post/Denver Public Library/Western History Collection/X-RMN-049-9397)
The lifeguards at the park were mostly white, the children and families using it mostly Chicano. In 1970, community activists took over the park. In his book on the Chicano movement, “The Crusade for Justice,” Ernesto Vigil describes young people tearing down the fence and jumping in the pool, where they taunted police who tried to arrest them. Over two seasons, they staged “splash-ins” and taunted the lifeguards, and when the white lifeguards quit, Chicano teenagers who had been training for this opportunity moved into their jobs. By 1971, the park was effectively under the control of the Chicano movement.
Activists staged similar takeovers at Lincoln Park, renaming it La Alma, and Curtis Park, which they renamed Mestizo Park.
In a 2014 interview with La Madre Tierra, a Latino environmental organization, Arturo “Bones” Rodriguez, who was one of the organizers of the takeover and who ran the pool there, quoted the Mexican revolutionary Emiliano Zapata: “The land belongs to those who work it.”
The actual takeover of the park was for jobs for youth, but it also had a social-political agenda: if we could have a space that reflected our culture and what we define as a Chicano. It was developing a new man and a new woman, based on our historical raíces, from indigenismo to the mezcla of our people from Europe to Africa to China and so forth. That was one thing that we really promoted in three square blocks, a sense of community, a sense of a peoplehood and how we could transform it.
This was when people started calling the park La Raza Park.
La Raza means simply “the people,” but it’s a powerful idea in Mexican and Chicano identity. “La raza cósmica” represents the mixture of all races in the Latino people. In Latin America, the day we mark as Columbus Day is Día de la Raza. “La Raza” could be considered the opposite of Christopher Columbus. It does not celebrate the colonizer, but the colonized, the people who emerged from and survived this cataclysm.
View of the tennis court in Columbus Park at 38th Avenue and Osage Street in Denver, Colorado. Between 1930 and 1940. (Photo: Denver Public Library/Western History Collection/X-20330)
Lucero, now 73, moved to Denver as a young boy and later became involved in the Crusade for Justice. Following the crops, his family came north from New Mexico and settled in with relatives in the Northside. He remembers being at the park nearly every day in the summer.
Before the community took over the park: “The pool was filthy. There was broken glass. The park was run down. They were not taking care of it at all,” Lucero said.
And after: “We cleaned it. We painted it. We started having community forums. … It became a political gathering place of the Northside.”
Juan Espinosa, now retired from the Pueblo Chieftain, was a student at the University of Colorado Boulder in the early 1970s. He co-founded El Diario and worked as a photographer for United Mexican American Students (UMAS) publications. He remembers La Raza Park as the place for young, politically aware Chicanos. People would come from around the city and around the region to be there.
One night in 1972, while he was still in Boulder, he got a call to head down to the park. The police were planning to make a show of force against people violating the park curfew.
Espinosa describes the police “lined up on one side and like a forced march they pushed people out of the park. People were running, and people were taking people in and hiding them in their yards.”
There were dogs. There was tear gas.
“This wasn’t a political rally,” he said. “This was just people who lived in the neighborhood using the park because it was a pretty dense part of the neighborhood.”
Espinosa took pictures of police officers abusing two young women spread across a patrol car and soon found himself under arrest in the back of a paddy wagon.
He said the police took his film and then took him and a dozen other people in the back of the van on a “rough ride” for about an hour. He later pled no contest to interfering with a police officer.
These types of confrontations became commonplace in the early 1970s. Sometimes there were shootings and fire bombings in the neighborhood. Plenty of people weren’t happy with the situation. With the Hispanic vote divided between two candidates, Italian-American tavern owner Eugene DiManna was elected to what was then the District 9 council seat in 1971. According to Vigil, DiManna told police, “I want them Mexicans out of the park, and if you have to break heads to do it, then do it,” and he criticized the city administration for “handcuffing” the police. Vigil writes that DiManna would personally call in sweeps of the park and even had his own code name, Ocean 9.
Chicano activists circulated petitions for a recall in what would prove to be a years-long process riven with legal challenges. Sal Carpio, one of Denver’s first Hispanic elected officials, finally replaced DiManna in 1975.
Members of the Crusade for Justice (La Crusada Para Justicia) march in protest down 15th Street in Denver, Colorado. Between 1966 and 1970. (Photo: Shannon Garcia/Denver Public Library/Western History Collection/AUR-2152)
Diane Medina, 59, grew up in the neighborhood and moved into a house on Navajo across the street from the park in the mid-70s. Her mother still lives in that home, and she lives next door. Not everyone in the community agreed with the Crusade for Justice’s approach, but in her mind, the Chicano movement taught her to question the status quo by the examples set in the park and around the community.
Diane Medina sits under the kiosko in La Raza Park. This is a place with spiritual significance for her. (Photo: Kevin J. Beaty/Denverite)
“It caught my attention in that the folks who were talking looked like me,” she said.
Medina said she usually wasn’t allowed to go to the park. Newspaper accounts describe drug-dealing and youths who antagonized police, but in her memory, the trouble never started with the people in the park. It started when the police showed up.
Sitting in the park, she points to the playground in the northeast corner of the park at 39th and Navajo, the corner that has always held the playground, and describes police approaching the park from the north down Navajo, shoulder to shoulder in their helmets and gear, such that the first thing they hit was the playground.
“And you can imagine the parents of those kids watching the police coming that way,” she said. “It’s kind of scary. My parents saw a lot of stuff like that. I saw a lot of stuff like that. This community saw a lot of stuff like that.”
Lupe Garcia, Diane Medina’s mother, on the porch of her home, where she’s lived since 1970. (Photo: Kevin J. Beaty/Denverite)
The memories of police brutality cannot be neatly separated from the good memories of the park, but what Medina most wants to remember is the feeling of pride and the feeling of being cared for by the community.
“It will never be the same, but I want it to have that same family, friendly, safe feeling that I had when the swimming pool was here because I really believed the people who worked here sincerely, truly, with all of their hearts cared about the community,” she said. “They would always be cleaning and picking up and making sure that you were safe when you were here. I saw that on a daily basis.”
Every year, there would be a “grand opening” to celebrate the anniversary of the takeover of the pool. This was a big party with food and music and dancers and speakers. No one had ever gotten a permit for this party, though technically gatherings of 25 or more people needed one.
In 1981, the police decided to break up the party, not at night to enforce the curfew, but in the middle of the day. The ostensible reason for this was the lack of a permit.
Lucero said hundreds, maybe thousands, of people — including parents looking for their children — were given less than five minutes to clear the park before the police moved in. He describes a “frenzy.”
“They started throwing tear gas, and people started throwing things back — bricks, bottles,” he said. “Then they let the dogs loose on everyone, on little kids. It was pandemonium.”
Lucero made this video about the riot:
Medina remembers this day as well, though in her mind it blends in with other nights.
People came running from the park to her parents’ house.
They asked her father for water to clean their eyes and huddled on the porch for safety. A police officer marched into the yard and demanded that he make all the people on the porch leave.
The spigot on Diane Medina’s parents’ home where people tear-gassed at La Raza Park across the street came seeking relief. (Photo: Kevin J. Beaty/Denverite)
“And my dad said, ‘I will not do that. This is my property. You need to leave.’ And I was so proud of my dad because my dad was quiet, a hard worker, but when he stood up like that … I was so proud of him.”
Activists filed a lawsuit against the city, but a jury rejected their case in 1984 with a finding that the police and community members were equally at fault.
That same year, the city demolished the pool.
There were reasons: The pool was old, and its pumps failed constantly. It cost less money to build a new pool at 44th and Navajo, and that was all the money there was for pools. Other parts of town needed pools too, you know.
Vigil notes bitterly that the pool was allowed to deteriorate under the watch of Carpio and that it was demolished under Federico Peña, Denver’s first Hispanic mayor.
In return, the community — eventually — got the kiosko, the pyramid-like structure that sits in the center of the park today. It was dedicated in 1990, and earlier this year, Denver artist David Ocelotl Garcia completed beautiful murals inside it.
Depopulated of ‘threatening’ Latinos, La Raza Park could more easily be appreciated by middle-class newcomers as a visual amenity and a space of restive solitude. In discussing the park with me, Denver Parks and Recreation employees always emphasized how the grass is green and how it is now maintained as a visual asset along the commercial corridor of West 38th Avenue. When I asked middle-class newcomers about North Denver Parks, most of them, first admitting that their preferred outdoor experiences were hiking and skiing in the nearby mountains, mentioned how well kept they seemed. This is how formal regulation facilitated La Raza Park’s transformation from a vibrant Latino zócalo for Northside Latinos into a quiet visual amenity for middle-class newcomers.
Langegger also connects the closure of the pool to the rise in gangs a decade later. Social reformers going back to Jane Addams have advocated for parks and recreation programs to give teenagers the sense of self-worth they need but might otherwise find in less wholesome places.
Back in the 1972, after confrontations between police and community members at La Raza Park, Chicano activist Rudy Garcia wrote in an op-ed in the Denver Post that people concerned about violence on the Northside should advocate for more parks, not more police.
Give Chicanos parks and recreation facilities comparable to Washington Park and in the end it will prove less expensive than bombed buildings or the lives of policemen, Chicanos or bystanders. … Give our young people what they need and the trouble will subside.
La Raza Park was home to swimming and diving teams that were a source of neighborhood pride.
But in 1984, pool manager Charlotte Rodriguez told the Denver Post the new Aztlan Pool was overcrowded and mostly attracted younger kids. The pool was smaller than the closed La Raza Park pool, and it didn’t have any diving boards. Teenagers weren’t going there.
Councilwoman Debbie Ortega proposed formally renaming the park La Raza-Columbus Park in 1988 but in the face of intense opposition from the neighborhood’s Italian-Americans, the City Council voted 7-6 to reject the change.
Medina said La Raza Park remains an important place historically, politically, even spiritually.
But it’s not the same.
“There’s no laughter,” she said. “The kids are not here. It became very quiet. … It’s what you see now.”
Medina watches from her window, as she has for 40 years, and she calls the city when she sees a need or a danger, and she doesn’t stop until something happens. Picnic tables. Benches. Wood chips to replace the sand in the playground when she saw that another nearby park got that treatment first.
Diane Medina peers through her front door into La Raza Park across the street. (Photo: Kevin J. Beaty/Denverite)
Now the neighborhood is changing again, with middle-class white families moving into the area. Blocks of new townhomes with rooftop decks replace one-story bungalows with front porches. Brewpubs replace corner bars. For the first time in decades, Latinos are no longer a majority in these neighborhoods.
And there is a new effort afoot to change the name. Councilman Rafael Espinoza of District 1, elected last year, is circulating a petition to again formalize a hybrid name. He said the city should rename the park both to honor its history but also for pragmatic reasons. It might be confusing to people who don’t know the area and are trying to find La Raza Park to see a sign that says Columbus Park.
And a hybrid name recognizes both the Italian-American and the Chicano history.
“It’s not appropriate to erase the history of one with the other,” he said. “And my view is that you don’t get one without the other. … There are multiple layers of history there, so let’s do the right thing.”
Medina said she’ll advocate for the name change, but it doesn’t really matter what the city does or doesn’t do.
“It’s going to be La Raza Park until I die,” she said.
If you found a piece of pizza in the street, would you eat it? If you found a random USB drive in your mailbox, would you plug it into your computer?
Your answer to these questions, at any rate, should be"no", but, for some fraction of humanity, the answer, on occasion, is, "yes." Maybe it depends on the day. Say it's a random Thursday in late September, and life is feeling pretty short. And you're feeling a little dangerous. That random USB drive that showed up in your mailbox? Why not give it a whirl. What's the worst that could happen? Or, better: what's the best?
Lately, a lot of Australians have been encountering this exact dilemma, after some random USB drives have been showing up in mailboxes in the Australian state of Victoria.
Police say that the drives are "believed to be extremely harmful," though you wouldn't really know it until you tried it out yourself, wouldn't you?
"Upon inserting the USB drives into their computers victims have experienced fraudulent media streaming service offers, as well as other serious issues," police said Wednesday.
This seems like a small price to pay for a brief moment of thrill, though you can be your own judge on the matter.
So far, the drives have just been seen in Pakenham, a suburb of Melbourne, in what is either a silly prank or a low-tech hacking attempt. But the fun could be coming soon to a city near you.
At a nature reserve in southern Spain, last Friday the park manager discovered "the headless body of Sauron," a dominant male bison, after the herd has been acting strange for a couple of days, Agence France-Presse reports. The bull, who was named after the Dark Lord of Mordor because "he was the biggest and most powerful," park staff told AFP, weighed close to 1,500 lbs.
Overhunted European bison went extinct in the wild in the early 20th century, but a conservation program has been building up herds and re-establishing the bisons' presence at reserves across Europe. This herd of bison arrived at the Valdeserrillas reserve in Valencia, less than a year before this incident.
As AFP reports, the animals had been behaving unusually for a couple of days before Sauron was found dead—they had wandered away from their usual haunts and seemed nervous. When Sauron was found, three other bison were missing, including the second bull found decapitated.
It looked like the herd had been poisoned, and the park staff believes that whoever decapitated the bison was acting not out of malice but greed—the heads could be mounted and sold as trophies.
The police are currently investigating. The two other missing bison were found safe.
Every year, at a location disclosed only to invitees, there is a secret puzzle party.
Fans, craftspeople, and collectors gather to share the latest innovations and creations in the realm of mechanical enigmas. From tricky puzzle boxes to untouchable puzzles contained in glass bottles to misleadingly simple stacking games, the International Puzzle Party (IPP) is the place to find unique works by some of the world’s leading puzzle creators. If you can get an invite.
In the last century, a devoted collector culture has grown up around games like puzzle boxes, Rubik’s Cubes, and other mechanical enigmas. However it wasn’t until the advent of the IPP that this disparate fan group had a good way to get together and share their ideas. “Puzzle-solving, even though it feels and sounds like a singular experience, it really isn’t,” says Nick Baxter, captain of the U.S. Puzzle Team, and current director and organizer of the IPP. “It’s a virtual shared experience and people who like puzzles really enjoy sharing their experiences.”
The International Puzzle Party was first established back in 1978 by noted puzzle collector and scholar, Jerry Slocum, who hosted the first gathering in his living room for a hand-picked selection of collectors. After that first gathering of like-minded puzzle collectors, Slocum continued to host the event every year, and the attendance continued to grow as word-of-mouth spread throughout the puzzling community, enticing people from all over the world to come and trade their puzzles. “It already had an international flavor,” says Baxter. “It was in Los Angeles, and folks were coming from Japan, were coming from Europe.”
The IPP began being hosted by different people across the planet. The ninth IPP was the first to be held outside of the U.S., taking place in Tokyo, and each year since, the party has rotated between different locations in Europe, the U.S., and Japan.
Since its inception, the IPP has become somewhat of a rallying point among the puzzling community, helping to bolster and encourage collectors across the globe. “I was surprised that there are hundreds of people who are interested in the mechanical puzzle,” says JinHoo Ahn, a collector and designer whose three-piece symmetry puzzle, “Bitten Biscuits,” received honorable mention at this year’s IPP. “In my country, it's hard to find a person who likes to collect puzzles. So it was a great experience to meet these people in IPP.”
“The IPP is very important to me,” says Gál Péter, a Hungarian collector whose puzzle, “Matchbox Playground,” was one of the top puzzles in the design competition at this year’s IPP. “It’s a thrill to meet so many people who all share the same interest, and yet have such different personalities.” While the event has become a beacon of puzzling camaraderie and togetherness, getting in takes a lot more than a handshake.
Baxter first began attending the IPP in 1993, and has been an integral part of the gathering each year since, taking over leadership of the event just four years later, when Slocum retired. In the years since he began overseeing the IPP, Baxter has maintained Slocum’s original vision of the gathering as a place by-and-for puzzle collectors, and has maintained a strict policy of only inviting members of the collector community, as well as the occasional special guest (including our own co-founder, Joshua Foer!). They tend to shy away from press, and don’t provide any public information about the IPP until after the fact. Even then, dispatches from the event are scarce, other than the results of the yearly design competition.
Baxter says that there are a few reasons for the IPP’s relative secrecy. “Part of it is a little bit, for lack of a better word, paranoia. From Jerry. From the early years,” he says. “Because there were some Chinese knock-off producers that tried to crash the party a couple of times, to basically get ideas.” Most of the attendees are puzzle makers and collectors only in their spare time, and ideally, are not attending the IPP as a commercial event, to have their designs bought or even stolen. Baxter stressed to us that the IPP is not a trade show. In fact, even people who make puzzles, but aren’t necessarily interested in the collecting aspect, are seen as suspect. “Anyone who is purely a designer that ends up being invited to the Puzzle Party has paid their dues in some sense,” says Baxter. “They are recognized as an integral part of the community.”
Another mitigating factor is capacity. IPPs taking place in the U.S. and Europe nowadays can see around 200 puzzlers in attendance. Those that take place in Japan see fewer attendees, just due to travel concerns, but they’ll still have well over a hundred collectors.
Gaining entry to one of the IPPs is sort of a puzzle unto itself, the solution to which is a lifestyle devoted to puzzle collecting. Those who do earn an invite get to experience a weekend of pure puzzlement.
As Baxter told us, the event usually takes place over the course of a few days, usually on a weekend. In addition to banquets, lectures, and tours of the local host city, there are two main components to the conference: the exchange and the party.
“The first interesting event is called the exchange, where everybody who signed up brings a copy of a puzzle they either designed or produced,” says Baxter. Participants bring puzzles and designs they have created, and everyone swaps with everyone else. So if you come with 72 copies of your original puzzle (“In Japan [2016] we had, I think, about 72 people.”), you will walk away with 72 different, new puzzles for your collection, and bewilderment. “It’s typical for what someone might bring to the exchange, [to be] something they designed, but they need someone else to produce it because they don’t have the skills. Or they’ve designed and produced it themselves, or it’s a collaboration of some sort. Or they’re none of the above,” says Baxter. Really the only rule is that you can’t bring a commercially available puzzle, lest someone already has it in their collection.
The second main event is what’s known as the party, which usually takes place the day after the exchange. This is where the collectors get to set up tables and show off a fuller breadth of their collection and creations. “The party is basically somewhere between a swap meet and a trade show, where participants will have a table, and they’ll have puzzles for sale that they’ve made, or resell from someone else, or puzzles from their collection that they’re just trying to unload,” says Baxter. In the early days of the IPP, people mainly swapped puzzles amongst one another, but Baxter says, as the community grew, and people became more aware of the relative value of the items in their collections, it became a mainly cash operation.
After the party, to close out the IPP, the winners of the Nob Yoshigahara Design Competition (named after a famous Japanese puzzler) are announced. The winners are decided by a jury of puzzle collectors, including Baxter, who judge the entered puzzles by a number of criteria including design and ingenuity. Other awards are voted on by the attendees. All kinds of puzzles have won honors at the IPP, as trends in the puzzling community ebb and flow. “For the first couple years, it seemed as if high-functioning Japanese wood puzzles were the automatic trophy winners,” says Baxter. “One of the designers called it, 'Big Wood.' A euphemism for fancy wooden puzzles that got everybody excited.” He says that in recent years, “twisty puzzles” (think a Rubik’s Cube), have been popular thanks to advances in 3D printing among other things.
But when it comes to what wins awards at the IPP design competition, anything goes. Baxter told us of one winning “packing puzzle” that was just a single block that had to be placed in a box, but could only fit in one orientation thanks to magnets embedded in the piece. While it was a simple puzzle, its inventiveness could not be ignored. “That kind of ‘aha!’ whether it be in the solution or in the design, those seem to be awarded a bit more readily these days,” he says.
The winner of the 2016 Grand Jury Prize was a puzzle called “Marbles Cage,” by collector/designer Volker Latussek. This seemingly simple puzzle consisted of nothing more than a box with holes in it, and a collection of marbles that the puzzler needed to take out and put back in. But even for Latussek, who has been collecting puzzles for near 25 years, and attending IPPs since 1997, the event is all about the community. “It was always great to see the other guys in person, to discuss and joke with them,” he says.
After the IPP ends, entrants to the design contest are posted online, but talk of the event goes right back to the puzzling forums and password-protected IPP website, usually garnering almost no media attention. The 2016 IPP took place in early August in Kyoto, Japan. If the date and location for the 2017 IPP have been decided, only the puzzlers know.
In July 1845, British curiosity-seekers headed to London’s Egyptian Hall to try out the novelty of the summer. For the price of one shilling, they could stand in front of a wooden bureau, pull a lever, and look behind a panel where six drums, bristling with metal spokes, revolved. At the end of its “grinding,” what it produced was not a numeric computation or a row of fruit symbols, but something quite different: a polished line of Latin poetry.
This strange gadget, a Victorian ancestor of the computer, was called the Eureka.
The Eureka was the brainchild, and obsession, of a man in southwest England named John Clark. The eccentric Clark was a cousin of Cyrus and James Clark, founders of the Clarks shoes empire (which went on to popularize the Desert Boot in the 1950s and is still going strong). Clark built the Eureka at a time when such devices were all the rage. As literature scholar Jason David Hall explains in an academic article on the Eureka, the machine joined other proto-computers like the Polyharmonicon, a machine that composed polkas, and the Euphonia, which “spoke” when a person played an attached keyboard.
But a Latin hexameter verse—that was something else. The hexameter is the meter of ancient epic, of the poets Ovid and Virgil. Each line has six metrical units called feet. A foot can be either a spondee—two long syllables—or a dactyl, a long syllable followed by two short ones. However, the fifth foot of the line is almost always a dactyl, and the sixth is usually a spondee. So there are strict rules for writing poetry in Latin hexameter that make it akin to following a mathematical formula.
_ ͜ ͜ | _ ͜ ͜ | _ _ | _ _ | _ ͜ ͜ | _ _
To ensure that the Eureka’s lines of automatic poetry not only scanned metrically, but made sense, Clark gave the words on each of the drums similar meanings, and had them obey the same syntactical order each time:
The number of possible permutations the Eureka can run through is a dizzying 26 million. “If we had it running continuously, it would take 74 years for it to do its full tour before it started repeating itself,” says Karina Virahsawmy, a curator at the Alfred Gillett Trust, the nonprofit that preserves the history of the Clark family and their company. “Every time I think about it, I’m still mind-boggled as to how somebody did that in the early 19th century.”
The Eureka was one of the forerunners of the programmable computer, invented by Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace. “From what we’ve seen and researched, Babbage would have gone to the exhibition,” Virahsawmy says. “There’s a possibility [Clark and Babbage] would have known each other.” Babbage once described Clark as being “as great a curiosity as his machine,” possibly due to his odd manner of dress: he was fond of wearing a wide-open shirt and a neckerchief.
The exhibition of the Eureka was successful enough that Clark retired on the proceeds. After he died in 1853, the machine ended up in the family shoe factory in Street, Somerset. It is now in the holdings of the Trust, where for years it sat gathering dust in a storeroom.
With a grant from the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council, however, the Trust and a team of conservators and scholars (including Hall) just restored the Eureka to working order, and they are now creating a full-scale modern replica of it. The team also plans to use 3D scans to make an interactive virtual replica that can be used online. The whole process will be chronicled in a short documentary film scheduled for release in early 2017.
The question remains, though: why Latin verse? The Greek and Roman classics were central to elite education in Victorian England, especially prosody (the study of metrical verse). When it originally went on display in the 1840s, the Eureka tapped into debates about education then swirling. Reformers wanted to dethrone the classics and broaden curricula to include subjects like chemistry and modern history. Whether a Victorian saw the Eureka as a celebration or a parody of classical education may have depended on his or her stance on reform.
Some Victorian observers were discomfited by the notion of a machine writing poetry, a challenge to human creativity if ever there was one. The controversy over artificial intelligence has only intensified since then. Maybe that’s why a device so seemingly esoteric still captures people’s interest.
Earlier this month, shortly after the restored Eureka returned to Somerset from the University of Exeter, the Trust exhibited it for a few days, ran some demonstrations, and got “great numbers” of visitors, Virahsawmy says. “It was very much eye-opening and awe-inspiring when people came in,” she says. After 170 years, this singular device is still mirabile visu (“marvelous to behold”), to quote one of Virgil’s immortal hexameters.
Satan has come to Salem! In a match seemingly made in Hell, the Satanic Temple is opening its new headquarters in Salem, Massachusetts, according to Reuters.
In a move that has some locals wringing their hands, the cultural and political organization known as the Satanic Temple, has set up shop in an old Victorian mansion in the city. The old house seems like the perfect space for the organization to base their international headquarters, as it used to be a funeral home. However, most recently, prior to the Satanists moving in, the space operated as an art gallery, a trend the Temple intends to maintain, although with a more devilish bent.
The new HQ opened its doors to the public this week, to show people in the community what they had to offer. A number of Satanic artworks were on on display, including a 7-foot tall bronze statue of the goat-headed demon, Baphomet.
While some in the local community seem worried about the Temple’s Satanic imagery, Salem City Council President Josh Turiel, doesn’t see what the fuss is about, telling Reuters, "We've had weirder things pretty much on every other street corner."
Despite the devil imagery, the Satanic Temple is mostly devoted to civic causes relating to the separation of church and state, and they hope to become a valued member of the Salem community. To that we say, Hail Satan!
