In the early 1970s, a group of looters searching for Pre-Columbian artifacts in the jungles of Colombia’s Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta stumbled upon a set of worn stone steps leading up a ridge from the shore of the Buritaca river. At the end of more than 1,200 stairs, they found the ruins of an ancient, silent, abandoned city.
Shortly afterwards, a slew of exquisite artifacts began to flood Colombia’s black market, leaving archaeologists of the era puzzled as to the origins of such intricate golden figurines, urns, beads and statues.
Investigators soon caught on to the trail left by grave robbers. The region, which had been dubbed “Green Hell” by the looters, seemed impossibly difficult. Between the impenetrable tropical forest, the steep, treacherous gradations slicked by constant downpours, and clouds of disease-bearing mosquitoes, progress was slow. But by 1975, excavations were underway, and the site was shortly thereafter revealed to the world as Ciudad Perdida, or the “Lost City”.
What the archaeologists had uncovered was incredible, one of the most important archaeological discoveries of the century—a massive city, once home to some 2,000-8,000 inhabitants.
Perhaps most remarkable about Ciudad Perdida is the fact that it was built some 650 years before Machu Picchu, around 800 CE. Though only a small portion of the site has been excavated, the city is an impressive feat of engineering, built along a steep mountain ridge nearly a mile above sea level. A complex network of stone bridges and drainage systems has maintained the city throughout the test of time.
The site is believed to have been the seat of power of the Tairona kingdom, which spanned throughout the Sierra Nevada and the northern region of Colombia. A testament to the stability of the society that constructed it, the Lost City was constantly inhabited from its construction up until its abandonment, which likely took place in the 16th century amid the arrival of Spanish conquistadores. During this period of contact and conflict, portions of the Tairona people moved further into the reaches of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, which allowed them to avoid the worst of Spanish colonialism of the 17th and 18th centuries.
Despite its name, the Lost City was never really lost, at least not to the descendants of the Tairona people who still occupy the region, today known as the Wiwa, Kogi, Arhuaco and Kankuamo. Though their ancestors abandoned the city centuries ago, the indigenous of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta never forgot about it. When the site was "discovered" in the '70s, indigenous leaders quietly asserted that they knew of the city’s existence all along. In fact, they had never stopped visiting the site, known to them as Teyuna, over the centuries. They simply had always been careful to keep its location a secret from outsiders in order to avoid precisely what happened after the looters found the city.
Today, after several years of closure in the early 2000s due to the kidnapping of foreign tourists visiting the Lost City during the height of Colombia’s armed conflict, the site is once again open to individuals interested in experiencing what can only be described as one of the greatest adventures in South America.
While Machu Picchu is accessible to just about anyone, only the most dedicated (and physically capable) of adventurers can visit the Lost City, which to this day is only accessible by a 27-mile hike through the same “Green Hell” experienced by those who uncovered the Sierra’s secrets.
The difficulty of the terrain is also part of what has provided protection to the descendants of the Tairona people, who believe the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta to be the center of the universe, and consider themselves to be the “Elder Brothers,” responsible for non-Tairona people, the “Younger Brothers,” from destroying the equilibrium of the natural world. Despite thousands of years of constant occupation, the Sierra Nevada continues to be one of the most ecologically intact and biodiverse places on the planet, thanks to the resistance of indigenous groups to those wishing to intrude into the region.
I visited the Lost City with a guide from Wiwa Tours, one of the five tour operators that have permission to lead tourists to the Lost City, and the only one that is operated by the region’s original inhabitants. My guide, Miguel, though barely 16 years old, had the demeanor of a wise elderly man. He walked barefoot in a traditional white tunic, carrying only a small woven shoulder bag, and barely speaking a word over the four days that he led us through the forest.
Watching small groups of tourists flail along the muddied paths, disrupting the great silence of the forest, I asked Miguel why his people allow visitors to the site. He explained that he and his community want people to understand and respect the culture of the descendants of the Tairona, and the only way to do that is to allow people to experience it first-hand.
Visiting the Lost City on the heels of a person who is likely a great-great-great-great-great grandson of someone who inhabited the site before its abandonment drove home the cultural value of Teyuna. But it also raised the question of sustainability in an age where tourism is a viable economic alternative in a country once largely controlled by illegal armed groups and powered by coca cultivation. How the place will change over the years under the never-ending flow of tourists is anyone’s guess. What seems most important, however, aside from preventing the degradation of the region’s ecology, is respecting those who have preserved it up until now.
A version of this post originally appeared on Tedium, a twice-weekly newsletter that hunts for the end of the long tail.
They change the color of our skin. They get stuck in our teeth. But for some reason, we can’t stop eating cheese curls, the puffiest snack food ever created.
But these corn-and-powder snacks didn’t just fall like manna from the sky into our bowls, always there for us ahead of our Bojack Horseman marathon.
The story of the cheese curl is one of the more unusual creation stories in snack-food history, starting, of course, in Wisconsin, an agricultural hub that has given us a lot of food innovations over the years. (Three words: fried cheese curds.)
Some of these were intentional, others not, but the accident that made the cheese curl proved hugely fruitful for Flakall Corporation, a Beloit, Wisconsin animal feed manufacturer whose owners later switched gears to producing snack foods, all thanks to the way the company cleaned its machines. The company’s approach to producing animal feed was to put the material through a grinder, effectively flaking out the corn to get as much material as possible from the grain, as well as to ensure cows weren’t chewing any sharp kernels.
“This flaking of the feed is of advantage because it avoids loss of a good percentage of material which otherwise is thrown off as dust, and gives a material which keeps better in storage by reason of the voids left between the flakes, such that there can be proper aeration, not to mention the important fact that flaked feed is more palatable and easily digested by the animal,” the firm stated in a 1932 patent filing.
The grinder did its job, but it wasn’t perfect, and periodically required cleaning to ensure it wouldn’t clog. One strategy that Flakall workers used was to put moistened corn into the grinder. During this process, however, something unusual happened: the moist corn ran directly into the heat of the machine, and when it exited the grinder, it didn’t flake out anymore—it puffed up, like popcorn, except without the annoying kernels.
By complete accident, Flakall had invented the world’s first corn snack extruder.
Edward Wilson, an observant Flakall employee, saw these puffs come out of the machine, and decided to take those puffs home, season them up, and turn them into an edible snack for humans—a snack he called Korn Kurls.
You’re noshing, in other words, on repurposed animal feed.
This state of affairs led to the second patent in Flakall’s history, a 1939 filing titled “Process for preparing food products.” A key line from the patent:
The device preferably is designed so as to be self-heated by friction between the particles of the material and between the particles and the surfaces of contacting metal and to progressively build up pressure during the heating period. Thus the uncooked raw material, having a predetermined moisture content is processed into a somewhat viscous liquid having a temperature high enough to cook the mass and heat the water particles to a temperature high enough for evaporation at atmospheric pressure but being under sufficient pressure to prevent it.
If that’s a little complicated to understand, a 2012 clip from BBC’s Food Factory does the trick.
In the video, host Stefan Gates takes an extruder and connects it to a tractor, making the extruder move so fast that it puffs the corn out in an extremely fast, extremely dramatic way.
Clearly, Flakall had something big. The firm eventually changed its name to Adams Corporation, which helped take some attention off the fact that it was selling a food product to humans that was originally intended for cows.
Flakall wasn't the only early claimant to the cheese curl throne, however. In Louisiana, a firm called the Elmer Candy Corporation, developed a product eventually called Chee Wees, that they said was the actual first. And later the New York-based Old London Foods came out with its own popular variation, the Cheez Doodle, in the late 1950s.
But the most notable brand that still sells cheese curls wasn’t the first mover, just the one with the best marketing and distribution.
That would be, of course, Cheetos, which came about in 1948. While Cheetos came along later than its competitors, the Frito company’s variation quickly overtook the market, in part because Cheetos had gained national distribution due to the prior success of its namesake.
That company’s founder, Elmer Doolan, worked out a deal with H.W. Lay and Company to market Cheetos to the broader market. It quickly became a massive hit.
The success of Cheetos was so impressive that it played a large role in the merger of Frito with Lay in 1961, as well as the company’s later merger with PepsiCo just four years later.
And that success continues to the modern day. Cheetos are by far the most popular brand of cheese curls in the United States: According to Statista, the Cheetos brand had an estimated $969.5 million in sales in 2016, with the next most popular brand being Frito-Lay’s more-upscale Chester’s brand, which garnered up just 7 percent of Cheetos’ total sales.
These days, here are two main varieties of Cheetos—crunchy, the most common kind, and puffed, which only came about in 1971 or so. Each is made through different variations on the corn snack extruder process.
Yet despite the early success of the Cheeto, its mascot, Chester Cheetah, didn’t come about until well after the product’s launch.
These days, Chester Cheetah is trying to goad Beyoncé on Twitter just like every other advertising mascot worth its weight in salt, but there was a time that the cheetah was seen as so impressive that there was chatter it could become a cartoon lynchpin.
In fact, Frito-Lay got pretty far down the road with Fox in turning the mascot, launched in 1986, into a cartoon. Yo! It’s the Chester Cheetah Show, as the toon would have been called, was developed as a potential part of Fox’s Saturday morning cartoon slate. (CBS also considered making the show, but rejected it.)
Problem was, advocacy groups were not happy with the idea for the show, because of the fact that its roots were very clearly as advertising. Action for Children’s Television (ACT) and the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) were among the groups that petitioned the FCC regarding the program.
“His only previous television appearances, indeed his entire existence, have been in traditional commercial spots designed to sell a product,” the FCC petition stated, according to the New York Times.
ACT noted that it was rare to petition the FCC about a cartoon only in the planning stages, but felt it had to speak up due to what it felt was the unprecedented nature of the idea.
It didn’t help that Kraft was trying to sell Cheesasaurus Rex, its macaroni and cheese mascot, as a TV show around the same time.
Just a few weeks after the controversy blew up, Frito Lay and Fox shelved the idea, with Fox claiming that differences in creative control and long negotiations killed the show—not protests.
“I still believe he’s one of the best characters since Bugs Bunny, and the fact he is associated with a product was irrelevant to us,” Fox Kids President Margaret Loesch told the Times.
Frito Lay spokesman Tod MacKenzie, in comments to the Associated Press, was a bit more honest.
“Since Chester came out in 1986, he’s been wildly popular,” MacKenzie told the AP. “We don’t want to jeopardize the job he’s doing here.”
The book Saturday Morning Censors: Television Regulation Before the V-chip, published in 1998 by Duke University Press, pointed out that while ACT didn’t officially win the case with the FCC—which, during the Bush era, was in no mood to censor a show that wasn’t indecent—the group acted like it did, especially after its efforts also killed off the Cheesasaurus Rex show.
“We feel we have zapped, for the time being, the problem of logos turning into half-hour programs,” ACT President Peggy Charred stated at the end of the controversy.
But you still have to wonder what might have happened if the show got the green light after all this. (This wiki page certainly does.) Would we be eating fewer cheese curls? Maybe more?
Clearly, the cheese curl has come a long way from the days when it was a happy agricultural accident.
The company acquired Flakall’s successor company, Adams International, in 1993. It was an acquisition that makes a lot of sense. In the 1950s, Maddox Machine Shop worked directly with the Frito company to build the machinery used to produce the company’s snack foods, and it grew from there.
This unique presidential library was built on the grounds of the William McKinley National Memorial, which contains the remains of the assassinated 25th President of the United States. The complex contains not only the domed mausoleum and presidential archives, but also a planetarium, science museum, and history museum, complete with animatronic dinosaurs and McKinleys, respectively.
Born in nearby Niles, Ohio, William McKinley served as an officer in the Ohio Infantry during the Civil War. After the war he studied law and established a law practice in Canton. He served in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1877 to 1891, and then was elected Governor of Ohio in 1892. He would go on to win the Presidency in 1896 (and again in 1900) through his "Front Porch Campaigns." His presidency was defined primarily by forays into imperialism, such as the Spanish-American War and military involvement in the Boxer Rebellion in China.
After his second inauguration, he went on a six-week tour of the country, concluding at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo. After giving a speech there on September 6, 1901, he was standing in a receiving line when anarchist Leon Czolgosz approached him and shot him twice. President McKinley died eight days later. Work on the memorial began swiftly, and the building was officially dedicated on September 30, 1907. Both President McKinley and his First Lady Ida Saxton McKinley rest in state in sarcophagi in the mausoleum's rotunda, along with their two daughters who died in childhood.
The museum exhibits onsite continue displays and artifacts pertaining not only to the former President and First Lady—including animatronic models of the couple—but also a section covering the history of Stark County (where the facility is located), complete with recreations of various 19th-century "main street" businesses and a large model railroad. A planetarium and a science museum are also onsite, featuring information on the natural history of the area as well as fossils of a mastodon, a saber-toothed cat, a mososaur, and the heads of a triceratops and a dunkleosteus. Guests can also compete against robots in various physical challenges. An animatronic allosaurus named Alice greets visitors to the science museum.
On a sunny peak on Saipan Island, the death toll continued to rise after the fighting had ceased when the Americans captured the Japanese stronghold.
This represented a major loss on behalf of the Japanese: The Allies had seized Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, the Gilbert Islands, the Marshall Islands, and were steadily advancing on Japanese territory. The Battle of Saipan was a devastating blow to the Japanese front. The Americans suffered almost 3,000 casualties, while all but 942 of the 30,000 Japanese soldiers were killed.
Civilians were terrified. The U.S. troops had not made an effort to distinguish between combatants and civilians, often shooting at the first sign of movement in caves and underbrush. Because of this, information circulated that the American soldiers would be brutally raping, torturing, and murdering their prisoners of war. In order to die with dignity rather than at the hands of their captors, a staggering 8,000 soldiers, civilian men, women, and children committed suicide by leaping off of a cliff into the sea. This communal death earned the cliff its new name, Banzai Cliff, because the jumpers allegedly shouted "banzai" while they plummeted to their deaths, wishing the emperor 10,000 years of life.
Where the threat of torture and murder came from isn't clear. It may have been based on the actuality of war crimes on the part of the Americans. The local Japanese military may have spread the order to commit suicide, or civilians may have followed suit after seeing numerous soldiers leaping to their deaths. Another rumor is that the order came from Emperor Hirohito himself, though this is unlikely.
The island is now dotted with memorials to the bloody battle and its aftermath. The Japanese airstrip still stands, and a peace memorial nearby features Japanese Ha Go tanks. With its many obelisks and buddha sculptures, Banzai Cliff serves as a grave reminder that the casualties of war don't end on the battlefield.
Next to the larger, newer, and more stately Metropolis Cathedral in the heart of Athens is an inconspicuous little building that shouldn’t be overlooked.
Measuring just 25 feet by 40 feet and shadowed by the surrounding buildings, many tourists mistake the Church of St. Eleftherios as one of the many stabilized ruins standing in the ancient city.
But upon closer inspection, this odd church has a marvelously mashed-up history that dates back nearly a millennia and still remains largely unchanged since it’s construction.
Commonly called the “Little” Metropolis Church, purported dates of it’s creation vary widely with scholars arguing anywhere from the 8th century to the 15th. The reason for the confusion is due to the repurposed use of building materials, mostly marble blocks from non-Christian temples, that were cobbled together to build the church.
Assembled from older pagan temples from the area made sense at the time. Not only was it cheaper and more convenient, but it also removed the old heathen religious artifacts from public record. The patching together of previously used building material, called “spolia" is not uncommon for the ancient world, and the process of "baptizing” these pagan objects was simple: just carve a cross on it.
This practice of neutralization, known as “sphragis,” covers the Little Metropolis Church. Almost all of it’s blocks with images have little crosses carved in them despite depicting ancient Greek and Roman gods.
Over 5,000 miles from Athens, all the way across the Atlantic, you'll find the Greek Parthenon—or rather, a full-scale replica of the ancient structure. Inside is a recreation of Parthenon's centerpiece, a 42-foot statue of Athena. Built for the 1897 Centennial Tennessee Exposition, the replica monument also doubles as a small art gallery.
Sarnia, Ontario has just over 72,000 inhabitants, but over 60 chemical plants and oil refineries sit in a 15-mile-wide section outside town known as "Chemical Valley."
The smokestack-filled skyline used to be a point of pride for Ontarians, a symbol of production, economy, and modernity. Now, the air smells like rotten eggs and visitors are advised to use respirators. In 2005 there was a record high of 46 smog days when school was cancelled because of the dangerously high concentration of pollutants in the air.
The water is poisoned too. The refineries and plants all sit on the bank of the St. Clair River, where they are accessible by industrial ships. The runoff of from the chemical industry has severely polluted the river, which feeds into Lake Huron.
The most at-risk place in Sarnia is the Aamjiwnaang First Nations Reserve, home to a few hundred Chippewa, which is surrounded by petroleum refineries. It's one of the most toxic places in North America, with sulphur-scented air that outsiders find hard to breathe. The close quarters mean that factory accidents come at a high cost. Daycares, schools, workplaces, and public parks have all seen waves of illnesses that residents blame on refinery spills.
Sarnia has the highest reported cases of hospitalization due to respiratory illness of the entire province and an abnormally high miscarriage rate. Authorities from groups like Dow Chemical, Sunoco, and Shell have dismissed health and quality of life complaints as anecdotal and unrelated to their plants on the edge of town.
The Cavillon cave of the Balzi Rossi is a charming place of rare beauty, and also a major prehistoric site in Europe; Cro-Magnon burials from 24,000 B.C.E. and female figurines known as "Venuses" were discovered here.
Located in Grimaldi, near Menton and Ventimiglia, the caves are found at the base of a cliff that faces the Roman old Via Iulia Augusta on the Mediterranean shore at French-Italian border. The place and it's museum is open to visitors.
Every city has its own character and spirit. Among familiar towering skyscrapers and congested streets, there are unique layers folded in the fabric of urban environments. These nuances are what Sohei Nishino captures in his massive monochromatic map series Diorama Maps.
For the past 14 years, the 34-year-old photographer and artist has wandered up and down streets, alleyways, mountain tops, and monuments snapping thousands of photos of major cities around the world. He’ll spend anywhere from one to three months taking pictures with his 35mm Canon EOS 1V before he returns to his studio in Shizuoka, Japan and begins the long, arduous process of piecing together the tiny contact sheet prints on a large canvas.
The maps are like panoramic puzzles. The thousands of different black and white photos taken over months of walking through a city are layered in a chaotic, yet beautiful collage. Each of the photos build a part of the city—the streets, rivers, skyscrapers. So far, Nishino has captured the architecture, culture, energy, people, and day-to-day life of 20 cities.
From a distance, the steel gray abstract maps appear messy, whimsical, and almost illustrated. But, upon closer examination, intimate scenes unfold. You can gaze at individual photos of pedestrians crossing a street in Osaka, a bird soaring around the Oude Kerk bell tower in Amsterdam, a couple sitting on a doorstep in Havana.
“For me, assembling the images is the process of reconstructing my memory of the journey and seeing it from an overall view,” says Nishino. “In a sense, Diorama Map is like a tapestry which was weaved by thousands of threads of my months journeying through cities.”
When attending Osaka University of the Arts, Nishino would search for secluded, high places where he could observe the city and regain mental balance, he says. Gradually, he began to take photographs of his path, and make contact prints—a sheet of small-format film strips typically intended to review a series of images.
Nishino pasted the prints to postcards that, when assembled, revealed a map of his journey. He continued to piece together more areas of the city until he completed his first diorama map of Osaka.
For Nishino “the act of walking is very close to meditation.” For every diorama map, he’ll start by trekking around the city by foot. When he first began the series, he only took photographs from a birds-eye-view, climbing up monuments like the Hagia Sophia mosque in Istanbul, Turkey.
While he reveled in the breathtaking views from above, Nishino realized that the overlooked, ordinary scenes of everyday life of the locals were just as beautiful. In his recent maps, he experiments with more complex angles throughout a city, including photos taken from underground, a canoe sailing on a river, and between narrow streets.
“It gives more depth and reality, and captures the characteristic of the city,” he says.
After shooting, Nishino returns to his studio, develops the film, makes contact sheets in the darkroom on photographic paper, and then cuts out all the tiny contact sheet photos to make one large single shot. Each of the small photographs are placed onto a large white board in which he will sketch out a template of the map of the city—a tricky process since he uses almost all the photos he takes.
By the end of months of shooting, Nishino will have thousands of photos (his latest map of San Francisco contains about 2,000 photos). He divides all the photographs by area to make it clear where they were taken, he says. After creating the tiled collage, he reshoots the map with a digital camera and prints it on photographic paper.
The result is not your traditional map, but a look at a city from an individual’s view point. “Maps existed not only for showing us correct geographical information like Google maps, but they also existed for our personal memory and sense of time,” he says.
Even though the layered, collage effect blurs the urban environment, there are distinguishable features that make it easy to identify the city. For instance, you can make out the edges of the island of Manhattan and see the winding river Thames in London.
Since the maps are also devoid of color, the viewer is forced to recognize the objects within the maps, Nishino says. However, it doesn’t prevent the cities from emitting vibrancy. Nishino adds individual flare to each map: shades of color can be seen in the carnival scene in Bern, and you may be able to spot the portraits of his friends in the map of New Delhi. Nishino encourages people to use his maps to get lost in cities.
“Before [Diorama Maps], I used to see the city as a mass of solid architecture,” Nishino says. “Now, I see the city more as an organic lifeform that has personality. I realize that how I experience and walk in the city does change my attitude towards the city itself.”
Watch a time lapse of Nishino piece together his latest map of San Francisco:
Newly restored in time for "Star Trek's" 50th anniversary, the actual 18-foot model from the original series is now prominently on display in the lobby of the National Air and Space Museum, with working lights and an interactive kiosk.
This sphinx-like sculpture is a tribute to Native American leader Shateyaronyah, known as Leatherlips by settlers because when his word was given, it could be trusted—his words were as strong as leather.
Leatherlips served as a sachem of the Wyandot tribe in Ohio, and controversially encouraged maintaining peace with white settlers, even at the cost of losing native lands. Native Americans lost most of Ohio with the signing of the Treaty of Greenville in 1795, and Chief Leatherlips was among the signers—a stance that ultimately led to his death.
As Native Americans lost land and more when Americans entered the Ohio Territory, a split of opinion developed as to what to do about it. Some sided with Tecumseh, who did not sign the Treaty of Greenville. Others sided with Leatherlips, who advocated for cooperative co-existence despite the fact that the Wyandot's numbers had been dispersed and depleted since the arrival of settlers on their land.
Leatherlips' unpopular position divided Wendat tribes. A committee headed by his own brother sentenced him to death for witchcraft 1810, though in reality it was widely known the execution was political. Despite the efforts of settlers to dissuade or even bribe the executioners, Leatherlips was executed by tomahawk.
This limestone monument in the shape of Chief Leatherlips' silhouette, erected in 1990, overlooks Scioto Park. Visitors can stand on the head of the ill-fated chief to look out on the very land that he signed over to the settlers.
As odd as it may seem, there is an entire museum in Poznań, Poland that celebrates a single pastry. But not just any pastry: the "rogale świętomarcińskie” or “St. Martin’s Croissant.”
This savory-yet-sweet delectable delicacy is a legally protected cultural heritage treat, recognized by the European Union as a Protected Geographical Indicator. The law celebrates the protected recipe and tradition associated with St. Martin, which has become a staple of the diet of Poznanians—particularly every year during the town’s St. Martin festival.
The tradition started in 1891 when a young priest of the St. Martin’s church in Poznan, John Lewicki, was petitioning his congregation to look for a way to inspire locals to be charitable towards the poor in the cold winter months. After his sermon, a young confectioner at a nearby bakery watched a horse lose it’s shoe and, remembering the legend of St. Martin, was suddenly inspired to create a croissant in the shape and give it to the poor. He filled the pastry with an almond and poppyseed paste and began passing them out to beggars on the street.
The charitable event caught on and has become a celebrated event in the town’s history when every year on November 11, St. Martin’s Day, the town consumes 700,000 croissants during the annual St. Martin’s Day parade.
The croissants are different from the well-known French version. Firstly, they are folded 81 times into the shape of a horseshoe. Each fold requires a filling of a paste, made from poppy seeds and mixed with nuts, raisins, almonds, sugar and butter. After baking, a hefty amount of icing is poured over the top of the pasty and it is sprinkled with more nuts and sugar. By law, the pastries must weigh between 150-250 grams. After sitting for a moment to cool, they are ready to eat!
The museum is one of the newest in the region and is located inside of a recently restored renaissance home. It is less of a museum, though, and more of a hands-on bakery. Inside this unique space, visitors partake in an interactive baking process where they learn about the history of St. Martin, Poznan, and the famous croissants. At the end, you get to try the delicious treats and receive a certificate that entitles you to bake the legally protected croissant yourself.
As a visitor to Havana, Cuba, it's easy to feel like you're missing something. Since the revolution in 1959, Cubans have found ways to get what they want, even if buying a house once meant getting a sham marriage to the previous owner or eating well meant buying food on the black market. For every official system, it can seem like there's another, less official way of getting by, working just out of sight.
But some of Havana's secrets are easier to decipher. Most places have codes, and as a visitor it can feel like they’re secrets to be unlocked. Here's a quick key that'll help decode some of the basics.
There are two official currencies.
Cuba has two currencies, the Cuban peso, or CUP, and the convertible peso, or CUC. Most Cubans get their salaries in CUP; foreigners uses CUCs. The bills are the same size, but there’s an easy way to tell them apart. CUP feature the faces of national heroes; CUCs feature monuments.
There’s a symbolic connection between CUPs and CUCs, though: the same denomination will honor the same hero in both currencies. So, for example, a 5 CUP bill has a bust of Antonio Maceo, second-in-command during the Cuban revolution, and the 5 CUC bill shows the Havana monument built in his honor.
No one calls Avenida Salvador Allende by its official name.
Originally, this street, the first connecting old Havana to the stately Vedado neighborhood, was named after the Spanish king Charles III—and among locals, it's still known by its old name, Avenida de Carlos III.
Before you can hail a collective taxi, you have to know where you're going.
To avoid the overcrowded buses, many people use “taxis collectivos”—old cars that run regular routes along the city's major thoroughfares. Not all the taxis on a particular street are going the same way, though, and they will only stop to pick up passengers that are going in the same direction the driver's headed. Riders can indicate which route they want with hand signals. For instance, if you're on the east side of Avinida Rancho Boyeres, you can signal that you're headed to Vedado...
...Old Havana...
….Carlos III...
...or straight ahead.
Many of the cars belong to the government.
All-gray license plates with numbers starting with P are privately owned. A blue strip on the left-hand side of the license plate indicates it’s a government car—and more likely to be made after 1959 and imported from China.
Since 2014, the government has been selling imported cars, but at an incredible mark-up. Before that, the only way for a private person to buy a car was to get a letter of permission from the government, which, on the secondary, underground market, were worth about $2,000.
Uniforms are color-coded.
Elementary school kids wear red shorts; middle school students wear mustard-brown pants and skirts; pre-college students wear dark blue bottoms and light blue tops. If you see groups of young people wearing sharp white shirts and black bottoms, they're likely studying to go into the tourism industry.
Teenagers also color-code themselves.
Havana teenagers who are passionate about pop identify as mikis (after Mickey Mouse), and girls in this group often wear tight, bright pink outfits or dye their hair the same shade. Emo kids wear black, as do friki teengagers, who spike their hair and wear tattoos.
A cute little park can mean a building didn't make it.
Many of Havana's buildings are in bad shape, but even after the Office of the Historian of Havana designates a building for restoration, families can choose to stay or to move out. Often they stay, because there's a real risk the renovated building will house fewer families and not all of the previous residents will be able to return. Because of these and other delays, some buildings can't be saved, and after they're torn down, the city will turn the empty lot into a pocket park.
If you see this sign on a house, you might be able to stay there.
Casas particulares are private homes that pay a fee to the government in order to operate as guest houses.
A white bust of a man’s head means you’re outside a school or other government building.
It’s Jose Marti, another hero of the Cuban Revolution. There’s also a giant statue of him in the Plaza de la Revolucíon.
The numbered stones low to the ground aren’t a secret code.
A disc of light moves across the cathedral floor. The marble in its path lights up, revealing deeply colored swirls, rich with hues of burgundy, plum, caramel, and ochre. It is ancient rock, stained by terrestrial chemistry and by the infernal pressures of the inner Earth. Its surface is smooth and nearly reflective, testament to extraordinary craftsmanship but also to the effects of hundreds of years’ worth of penitent feet processing through the looming shadows of the church interior. The air smells of smoke and candle wax, and the occasional perfume of a passing tourist.
The source of this light is a hole punched through the roof of the church high above, elaborately accentuated by a brilliant halo of golden rays, painted to resemble the sun. The hole acts like a film projector. Daylight streams through, creating a narrow beam of illumination visible only in the presence of smoke or dust, as if something otherworldly has been forced into material form.
Seconds pass, minutes, an hour. Outside, the sun appears to arc slowly across the daytime sky; here, in response, the projected disc creeps inch by inch across the marble floor. At solar noon, when the sun has reached its highest point in the sky, the circle of light touches a long, straight line made of inlaid brass and copper, nearly 220 feet from end to end, or two-thirds the length of an American football field. Although this line extends more than half the length of the cathedral floor, it seems to follow its own geometric logic: it is a long diagonal slash cutting between two columns, against the building’s floor plan, as if at odds with the structure that houses it.
Stranger still, on either side of this brass line, words and celestial images have been carved directly into the rock. There are the 12 signs of the zodiac interspersed amongst Roman numerals and references to solstices. There is Aquarius, the water bearer; Capricorn, with its confusing mix of shaggy horns and the coiled tail of a sea creature; Sagittarius, preparing to fire a magnificent bow and arrow; and the pouting fish of Pisces. At first glance, these symbols seem pagan, even sacrilegious, as if the astral remnants of an older belief system have somehow survived beneath the feet—and beyond the gaze—of daily worshippers.
Yet these symbols are not there to cast horoscopes, let alone spells. They are there for purposes of church administration and astronomical science. This cathedral, the Basilica di San Petronio in Bologna, Italy, also doubles as a solar observatory—at one point, one of the most accurate in the world—and these signs of the zodiac are part of an instrument for measuring solstices.
“I can say that I literally tripped over the subject,” science historian John L. Heilbron explains to me. Heilbron is emeritus professor of history at the University of California, Berkeley, as well as the holder of advanced degrees in both history and physics. Born on St. Patrick’s Day in 1934, he continues to lecture on topics ranging from “vortex rings” to the epistemology of Niels Bohr. In addition to a biography of astronomer Galileo Galilei, he is author of an excellent book called The Sun in the Church: Cathedrals as Solar Observatories, a study of what are known as “meridian lines.”
When we speak, Heilbron is spending a long weekend in Joshua Tree National Park. He is an avuncular presence over the phone line, revisiting points he had published two decades earlier as if he had written them yesterday.
“I wondered what this brass line was doing there in the floor, encased in marble,” he continues, “with all these numbers running up and down it, inside a Catholic church. I decided to look into it. It was really that simple.”
“The lesson, though,” he laughs, “is that when you’re inside a church you should look down as well as up.”
Heilbron’s book, published in 1999 by Harvard University Press, was the first major English-language study to take this advice seriously, exploring the origins, meaning, and transformation of these early astronomical instruments hidden in plain sight, disguised in the very architecture of European cathedrals. Bologna’s Basilica of San Petronio is not the only example of a meridian line, although it was considered to be the most accurate. Santa Maria degli Angeli in Rome has a beautifully realized and particularly grandiose example cutting through its nave; Saint-Sulpice in Paris hosts its own, as does Santa Maria del Fiore in Florence; a church tightly nestled in the packed streets of Fossombrone, Italy, bears a meridian line; the heavily worn remains of a line are still visible in the cloisters of England’s Durham Cathedral; and the duomos of Milan and Palermo also contain their own meridian lines.
In the process of researching the phenomenon, Heilbron uncovered a surprising story of cooperation not only between religion and science, but between precision astronomical observation and Catholic liturgy, between architectural design and the Christian calendar. Direct, even enthusiastic collaboration, uniting esoteric science with canonical religious belief, lay at the core of this hidden story.
The very fact that there is a longstanding connection between astronomical observation and the Catholic Church would surprise many modern readers. If anything, the relationship between these institutions—that is, between the altar and the telescope, the cathedral and the meridian line—would appear to be antagonistic, even contradictory. After all, the Church rather infamously persecuted Galileo in the 17th century for suggesting that the Earth is not, in fact, at the center of the cosmos, and that, by extension, Church doctrine relating to God’s orderly plans for the world were inherently flawed. Galileo’s rejection as a heretic has become emblematic of the popular belief that there is an abyss separating religious faith from rational scientific inquiry.
This was not always the case, however. As Heilbron points out in his book, the Catholic Church supported astronomy for more than six centuries, from medieval times to the Enlightenment. This sponsorship continues into the 21st century, as we’ll see—although the meridian lines themselves had another, less lofty purpose entirely.
Easter, a Christian holiday commemorating Jesus Christ’s resurrection from the dead, is defined not only by Church liturgy but also by astronomical circumstance. As specified by the First Council of Nicaea, Easter is not a straightforward anniversary, always recurring on the same date from now until eternity. Instead, it is to be celebrated on the first Sunday after the first full moon after the spring equinox—an occasion already laden with astronomical significance. The equinox, after all, is a day when time is split equally into 12 hours each of light and darkness, of illumination and obscurity.
The stakes of getting the date right were unusually high, Heilbron writes. If the faithful were to worship Easter on the wrong Sunday, out of sync with the rest of Christendom, then their very souls could be at risk. This was not merely an academic concern: at the height of the Church’s calendar problem, in the second half of the 16th century, the eastern Church and the western Church were an incredible ten days out of sync with one another. This was only reconciled in 1582 when Pope Gregory XIII implemented what has become known as the Gregorian calendar reform.
Gregorian reform eliminated, at a stroke and literally overnight, ten entire days from the western European calendar. People going to bed on October 4th, 1582, when the reform was implemented, would have woken up the next morning to find it was October 15th. Although this disorienting reform was intended specifically to put the calendar back on track for reaching the next spring equinox on March 21st, March 21st is not always the true, astronomical spring equinox. To determine exactly when the equinox would be, in the future—and, thus, when Easter should properly be celebrated—a more subtle and astronomically precise tool of measurement was required. A meridian line.
Understanding the structure and rhythm of the cosmos through direct scientific observation was thus not antagonistic to Christian worship at all. It was an essential expression of human piety: an earnest attempt to synchronize human religious activity with the divine and invisible clockwork of the universe. And thanks to this vast astronomical device embedded in the floor of a cathedral, Easter could now be determined not just with a quick glance, but with unquestionable precision.
The first meridian line at Bologna was installed by an artisan and Dominican cartographer named Egnazio Danti in 1575; when the church was enlarged many years later, in 1653, however, a wall central to Danti’s instrument was displaced, fatally undermining its intended function. Almost immediately, Jesuit astronomer and engineer Giovanni Domenico Cassini was brought in to repair, extend, and substantially improve upon Danti’s work. Cassini later became director of the renowned Paris Observatory and shares credit for discovering Jupiter’s famous “red spot.” More recently, his name was borrowed for a high-profile NASA satellite mission launched in October 1997 to photograph the moons of Saturn.
Here on Earth, in 1655, Cassini began work on the meridian line that we still see today in Bologna. With the exception of repairs performed in 1695 and again in 1776, the device remains true to Cassini’s 17th-century design.
The Basilica di San Petronio tries to make the most of its meridian line. Although the line itself is now roped off and partially encased in plexiglass, these barriers have the effect of drawing even more attention to this strange diagonal slash across the marble. A small explanatory pamphlet is offered for sale near the cathedral entrance. Written by Giovanni Paltrinieri, a local historian, it comes in multiple languages; the English version was translated by none other than historian John L. Heilbron.
If it still seems surprising that a cathedral would house an astronomical instrument, consider the unusual spatial circumstances such a device would require. You need a large, flat surface on which a meridian line can be drawn. You need an open volume of unobstructed space through which a precise beam of sunlight can shine. You need a hole in a ceiling high enough so that this beam can track hundreds of feet, from one solstice to the next and back again. “The most convenient such buildings were cathedrals,” Heilbron writes.
The way meridian lines operate is both surprisingly complex and quite easy to grasp. As the sun tracks from north to south on its annual migration between the summer and winter solstices, its image on the cathedral floor also shifts, moving slowly along the meridian line. Halfway between the solstices, of course, are the spring and autumn equinoxes. Once the position of the solar circle indicates the spring equinox, believers must simply wait for the next full moon; the first Sunday after that full moon will be the proper date of Easter.
So far, so good. Constructing a well-functioning meridian was no simple matter, on the other hand, and there were many ways it could go wrong. In order to support those cavernous church interiors, for example, huge columns are required; those columns are large and orderly placed, but they also invariably complicate the possibility of placing a straight line uninterrupted across the cathedral floor. In Bologna, for example, the meridian line butts up against—and is partially absorbed by—a column. Other architectural details, such as cornices, can also get in the way, blocking the beams of sunlight so essential to the meridian’s function. Heilbron points out, for example, that, in Rome’s Santa Maria degli Angeli, an architrave—or door lintel—had to be partially removed to ensure that sunlight could reach the meridian line.
This vision—of selectively dismantling the interiors of European cathedrals, one architrave at a time, in order to transform them into finely tuned scientific observatories—is extraordinary, as if, beneath all the masonry and ritual, with just a slight movement of specific details, powerful astronomical tools lie hidden. Beneath the pulpit, a planetarium.
From the point of view of Church doctrine, however, a larger problem was beginning to emerge. Perhaps these instruments were too precise. The observations they enabled began to reveal evidence not that the Earth was stationary, pinned at the center of Creation, but, on the contrary, that the Earth was mobile, circling in a dizzying choreography around the sun. The cosmic model endorsed by the Church was wrong, in other words, and proof of this wrongness was revealed every season by instruments built into the very floors of some of Europe’s finest cathedrals.
Well within sight of the church pews, a moving beam of sunlight suggested that the cosmos was altogether stranger than Christian theology had allowed itself to imagine. In Heilbron’s words, Catholic officials had not expected “that their cathedral would provide information about the heavens opposed to the teachings of their church.”
Paul Mueller is a member of the Society of Jesus and administrative vice director of the Vatican Observatory. Raised in the American Midwest, he became a Jesuit after receiving a Bachelor of Science in physics from Boston University. From there, Mueller went on to an intimidating succession of advanced degrees in philosophy, divinity, sacred theology, and physics. He currently splits the year between the papal complex at Castel Gandolfo outside Rome and the Vatican Observatory in Arizona.
The Church, after all, is still actively engaged with astronomical research. Its sponsorship did not end with meridian lines, but has continued well into the 21st century with, among other things, the Vatican Observatory’s high-tech facility located in the remote darkness of Mount Graham, near Tucson. There, a dedicated team of Catholic astronomers—studying such topics as stellar evolution, the atmospheres of exoplanets, and processes of galactic formation—operates the Vatican Advanced Technology Telescope, or VATT, to watch the desert skies. Yet another unexpected juxtaposition of empiricism and faith will take place next spring, in May 2017, when the Observatory hosts an international workshop on “spacetime singularities” and gravitational waves at Castel Gandolfo, the Vatican compound on Lake Albano, the flooded crater of an extinct volcano southeast of Rome.
There is much less of a conflict than it might seem between advanced astronomical observation and Christian faith, Mueller explains to me, let alone between a basic measuring tool like a meridian line and Christian doctrine. In conversation, Mueller is precise and patient—but also slightly prickly. He does, after all, occupy an unenviable position of being attacked from both sides: by believers unsure of why he and his fellow brother-astronomers feel compelled to pry at the edges of the known universe, as if kicking the tires of Creation, and by secular physicists who seem all to eager to dismiss Vatican astronomy as hopelessly clouded by medieval superstition.
But, Mueller emphasizes, reason is crucial to religious practice. “If we are doing math, if we are doing science—for that matter, if we are doing art—any human activity done with generosity and reverence is acting in God’s image. Science is included in that.”
Contemplating the origins of the universe or measuring the obliquity of the Earth’s angular relationship to the sun is not in opposition to Christian faith at all, he stresses, no matter what those observations might reveal. Faith, in fact, he suggests, is precisely pinned on the confidence that religious doctrine and apparently contradictory scientific data will eventually be reconciled. There is no reason to dismiss or otherwise shy away from theologically uncomfortable scientific results, including previously controversial ideas, such as evolution and climate change, both of which Pope Francis has now urged Catholics to accept.
Whether the Church in Galileo’s time would have agreed with Mueller’s generous assessment is perhaps made clear by the astronomer’s cruel fate. Galileo, of course, was accused of heresy for promoting a heliocentric solar system (not to mention, as Heilbron writes in his biography of Galileo, for his arrogance). It was not until 1992, 359 years after his death, that Galileo was finally cleared of these charges—although the Church had quietly lifted its ban on Galileo’s heliocentric astronomy in 1757.
Mueller, however, also cautions me against over-emphasizing the role of meridian lines in Church affairs, in particular with determining the date of Easter. Of course, those lines would have been used to confirm the date of this major holiday, he says; after all, they were ingenious instruments of solar measurement. But remember, Mueller adds, the major Gregorian calendar reform took place in 1582—more than half a century before the era of meridian lines truly began and nearly 75 years before Cassini began his work in Bologna.
“My point is, sure, you can use a meridian line to help you with Easter,” Mueller tells me, “but that really happened after the fact—the calendar was already reformed by that time.” For Mueller, the meridian lines were simply testaments to the success of Gregorian calendar reform, given pride of place inside grand cathedrals “almost as a celebration of the fact that astronomy was used to fix the date of Easter, and in support of the Church’s new engagement with astronomy.” They were evidence of worshipful exactitude in celebrating the anniversary of Christ’s resurrection.
Alas, by the middle of the 18th century, at the very height of the meridians’ instrumental power—after lines throughout Europe had been reworked, renovated, and fine-tuned over many generations to be more accurate instruments than ever before—they were superseded for the complex work of solar observation. Meridian lines had been made obsolete by ever larger and more powerful telescopes, and by the use of precision-ground glass lenses.
The meridians’ usefulness did not disappear entirely, on the other hand; the lines were simply demoted. Formerly relied upon for measuring solstices, revealing unexpected angular details about the Earth’s relationship with the sun, and marking the date of Christ’s Resurrection, they were now used to determine local noontime.
If you return to the church of San Petronio just before solar noon—which is different than the abstract noon indicated by your wristwatch or smartphone—you will see that the disc of pale light on the floor is shifting horizontally toward the meridian line. At the actual moment of solar noon, when the sun is highest in the sky, the beam of light will touch the line itself, passing across it as morning becomes afternoon.
The meridian thus also acts like a daily clock—and, following their redundancy at the hands of powerful telescopes, meridian lines did indeed find a new role as a tool used to synchronize church bells. Heilbron refers to this as battling “the inconvenience of multiple noons,” an embarrassing problem where churches might ring out competing middays, sometimes several minutes apart, betraying the fact that the seemingly well-organized temporal structure of Christian civilization was in a state of minor disarray.
To a certain extent, this quotidian fate was built into the meridians’ very workings. As Heilbron points out, many of the craftsmen hired to work on the lines had been trained as clockmakers. Their skills in metalwork and precision instrumentation had prepared them well for work at an architectural scale.
Today, in an era of atomic clocks, smartphones, and digital timekeeping, however, meridian lines are not even useful for that. Now reduced to mere tourist attractions—and often overlooked entirely by visitors paying more attention to the frescoes, arches, and stained-glass windows—meridian lines nonetheless still function. They still silently mark the passage of time and the Earth’s movement around the sun, highlighting solstices and equinoxes as the rhythmic clockwork of the universe continues its restless motion.
Stranger yet, however, is the fact that these instruments are not, in fact, stationary. The churches, bulwarks of eternity, move. Little by little, decade after decade, these mountains of masonry are sinking, unsteadily settling into the soil, throwing off the angle of the sun and introducing a new source of inaccuracy into the resulting measurements.
This is true to the extent that the meridian line installed inside architect Filippo Brunelleschi’s Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore in Florence eventually became used as nothing more than a diagnostic tool for determining how much the cathedral itself had shifted. No longer useful for astronomical observation at all, the meridian became something more like an emergency light on the building’s creaking dashboard.
Even in Bologna, however, the church of San Petronio was moving downward. Heilbron explains that the hole punched through the cathedral ceiling, through which daily beams of sunlight blazed, “had fallen over 4 percent of its original height”—and this was in the late 1600s. It was only by comparing solstice measurements taken from San Petronio with other church meridians that the deformation was detected. Arguments over exactly how far the hole had shifted—with some people claiming only 1 percent, not 4—meant that “a battle ensued among the mathematicians of Bologna,” Heilbron writes. They soon descended into arguments over how their models of the cosmos had been distorted not by the Church but by the actual church: the building itself, that is, not the religious institution that funded their astral research.
Later, solutions to the problem of mobile architecture were proposed. These included attaching plaques to internal pillars that were structurally unconnected to the walls of the church. This meant that the plaques would not settle with the rest of the building and could thus be used as what Heilbron calls “a fiducial mark” for checking future measurements. Other approaches suggested using independently suspended floors so that, as the church changed position over time, the scientific instrument at its heart would remain untouched.
In a sense, Mueller’s point that the Church is now fully supportive of contemporary astronomical research is strangely borne out by this architectural detail. As these older buildings unevenly sink into the ground or become treated merely as sites for curious tourists, the real work of engaging with the cosmos has simply changed venue. The lines, however, remain, serving both as scars left by those unfortunate wars within the Church to separate faith and physics, and as seams that were able to bridge that gap.
Update 11/15: An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated that Galileo was executed for his beliefs. He was persecuted by the Catholic church, and forced to recant his views, but died naturally during his eight-year-long house arrest.
Paul Mueller is the administrative vice director of the Vatican Observatory, not an astronomer there.
In western Alaska, a man from Unalakleet came across these two unfortunate moose frozen into the river. Their antlers are locked together: they were fighting when they died.
Perhaps they drowned and were frozen later; perhaps they were so distracted by their battle that they didn't notice the cold creeping up on them. Either way, when the river froze, they were still locked together.
“It appears that one of the brow tines (on the antler) penetrated and may have ended this (battle) fast, leaving the ‘winner’ with a 1000 lb headdress and probably pulled his head into the water where he drowned,” Jeff Erickson, who helped recover the moose, told Craig Medred, an independent journalist in Alaska.
On Friday, January 20, 2017, Donald J. Trump will be sworn into office as the President of the United States of America. In an earlier age, we would have been blessed with over an extra month of Obama. For better or worse.
Incoming presidents have been being sworn in on January 20 since 1936, usually in a massive ceremony, full of all the pomp and circumstance befitting the introduction of a world leader—unless the 20th falls on a Sunday, in which case they are sworn in privately, and the party is held on the following Monday). But this wasn’t always the case.
The original day of inauguration for both Presidents and Vice Presidents used to be March 4, but the date was pushed up to January with the passing of the 20th Amendment to the Constitution. With the exception of George Washington himself, who was sworn in on April 30, 1789, each of America’s leadership teams took office on March 4, or publicly on the 5th, observing the Sunday rule we still abide by today.
This gap between election and formal taking of office was initially put in place for a few reasons. For one, as the Constitutional Accountability Center pointed out in a post from 2009, collecting and tallying the vote used to take a great deal longer than it does today, with numbers having to be carried across the country via horse and buggy. Not to mention the time it took for a president-elect to relocate to the White House. The other reason for the delay, and the reason there remains a gap of a few months to this day, is that there a number of things that an incoming president needs to figure out, like cabinet positions, while the outgoing president needs to spend that time easing the transition and protecting their legacy.
However, when the transition time lasted four months, it created a number of problems. Probably the most glaring example of the bad things that can happen by leaving a “lame duck” president in office for too long is what has come to be known as the “Secession Winter.” During the long wait between the election that put President Abraham Lincoln in office and when he finally took office, Southern secessionists were able to seize federal arms and defenses and establish the Confederate States of America, kicking off the Civil War. Neither the sitting president, nor the president-elect seemed able to impede the separatists, and by April of 1861, the country was at war. This has often been attributed to the long lame duck period.
Surprisingly, the four-month gap remained in place well after the Civil War and into the 20th century. The downsides of the extended wait time would become apparent again in the 1930s after Democratic President Franklin Roosevelt defeated Republican President Herbert Hoover. During the uncertain time between their terms (from November 1932 to March 1933), The Great Depression was in full swing, and their inability of the two leaders to enact lasting economic reform worsened the trouble. However, even as this problematic gap was under way, action was being taken to shorten the lame duck period.
The 20th Amendment, which has been nicknamed “The Lame Duck Amendment,” was ratified in January of 1933. Among other things, this amendment shortened the time that politicians in both the Congress and the Presidency could remain in office after an election. The inauguration day for the president was moved to January 20, while the start date for Congress was bumped up even further to January 4. This two-week difference between the inauguration of new members of Congress and the incoming president was established to give Congress time to respond to a situation in which the regular voting process was unable to determine a president-elect, the candidate died, or some other scenario where there was no president to be sworn in.
Ever since, January 20 has become a day of either celebration or despair, depending on your political views. But no matter how you feel about the president being sworn in, at least you can be certain of when it will happen.
Government agencies are not renowned for their soulfulness. Hidden beneath opaque acronyms—DOL, PBGC, OSHRC, FMSHRC—the only hint of color these monolithic administrative bodies tend to display is the bureaucratic red tape that binds them.
But in a sea of otherwise dehumanized agencies one has set itself apart. The Federal Aviation Administration, better known as the FAA, regulates all aspects of civil aviation—airports, air traffic controllers, even commercial space vehicles. But where it differs from the rest of the acronymic morass is that it is the only government agency to have its own theme song.
“We're forty-some thousand strong, Working together as we sing this song. We are the people who can do the job when it’s on the line. We always know just what it takes, every hour of every day, to keep you flying safe across this land and around the world.”
So goes the first verse of the FAA Theme Song, also known by the alternative title, “The People of the FAA.” It’s a catchy ditty, a Sly and the Family Stone-esque tune that sounds as if it had drifted in from a 1960s variety show, having stopped off via Sesame Street along the way. It actually stems from the 1980s, when John Hanks, a former Public Affairs Director of the FAA, decided his agency needed a lift.
Hanks was renowned around the agency’s Washington offices for dressing up as Elvis Presley and performing at annual jamborees. It was while trying to drum up support for a savings bond drive that he first stumbled on the idea of forming a group made up of FAA employees. After posting ads in the FAA newsletter and around the agency’s headquarters, Hanks pulled together an all-female group of 10 employees to perform a thematically appropriate composition entitled “Bonds Will Keep You Together”.
In the only extant video of this song, the group—which became known as the FAA Chorale—can be seen shimmying and singing while wearing matching flight attendant uniforms of blue suits, white tops, and red scarves. For a few brief minutes they provided an alternative reality to government drabness, performing at bond drives year after year, not just at the FAA but across other agencies too.
Enthused by how well the FAA employees performed together, Hanks began working on his magnum opus as the 1980s drew to a close. “I am a child of the ‘60s pop culture,” Hanks says of his influences. Inspired by the dense “Wall of Sound” productions of producer Phil Spector, he composed a song that was both salutation and exultation.
“It was designed to bring the FAA employees closer together in the common purpose we had in our mission of aviation safety,” he notes.
This may seem a tall order, but it was not one that Hanks shied away from, confronting the agency’s mission head-on with verses such as:
“We're planning and building a way to make tomorrow even safer than today. While flying grows, so do we and that's what it’s all about. We want to help you get back home in a jumbo jet or flying alone. We make it safe up in the sky so you'll relax when you fly.”
The song was a huge success. “The employees loved it,” recalls Hanks, and even the FAA’s administrator—a distant figure in the agency—wrote to Hanks to thank him. The FAA Chorale went on to perform at numerous events across the country, including at one of Nancy Reagan’s “Just Say No” anti-drug rallies, following the headliner, Latoya Jackson, onstage.
There was really no precedent for such an anthem. While songbirds in the military have crafted dozens of themes and songs, organizational anthems within civilian agencies is much rarer. Indeed, such songs in praise of organizational acuity are much more common within private industry. Corporations once sponsored traveling musical revues—with budgets that often surpassed Broadway shows—to tout their products. (At American Standard Company’s The Bathrooms Are Coming show from 1969, songs like the delicate ballad “My Bathroom” were first, and last, sung.)
By the 1980s, though, corporate anthems had become more closely associated with Japanese firms, where they were sung to reinforce company spirit and improve overall morale, often being performed alongside morning exercises. The FAA is unique in being the only government agency to blow its own horn, literally.
While the song’s appearance on YouTube has seen ungenerous commenters associating it with a misuse of governmental funds, these criticisms are misplaced. The song cost nothing to the taxpayer except the time, effort, and enthusiasm of Hanks and his musicians. You may think the tune is cheesy, the singers a tad off-key, but perhaps if the DHS, EPA or even FBI had anthems of their own, that showed the rest of the country they were normal people doing normal things, the popular antipathy towards government might be ever-so slightly lessened.
Thanks to John Hanks and the Chorale, the FAA became, for a short while, just a bit more human.
An early 1960s-era Mark 2, in British racing green, hangs precipitously over Cours Victor Hugo in central Bordeaux. Luckily, no Jaguars were harmed in the making of this parking lot.
The garage serves Marché Victor Hugo (the local farmers market) and nearby sports arena, and was built in the 1960s by architects Jean Dauriac and Pierre Laffitte (who also built the arena). When the structure went under renovations in the early 1990s, designer, artist and architect Jean-François Dosso added the Jaguar, originally thought to be only a temporary public art installation.
But the vintage beauty has stuck around, dangling its bonnet out over the street. It’s a piece of clever trompe d’oeil, announcing the building’s purpose pretty clearly, but it also adds a touch of literal off-the-wall whimsy to an otherwise perfectly functional, if starkly unadorned, modernist building.
In 1929, the most devastating year in the history of Wall Street, 70-year-old New York stock trader George Daynor was among those who lost his entire fortune. Left with just seven dollars, no hope, and a tinge of depression, Daynor never would have dreamt that he would one day become a world-renowned name.
Directly following the stock market crash, Daynor claims to have been led by an angel on a 10-day, 112-mile hike to Vineland, New Jersey, where the only piece of property he could afford was a seven-acre junkyard situated on a swamp for the price of exactly seven dollars.
One night, while sleeping in the junkyard, Daynor’s angel reappeared in one of his dreams, urging him to use the mud, fuel leakage, bottles, bed frames, and unwanted auto parts on his property to build the “Palace of Depression,” a grand, marvelous home made of mud and junk. And that he did.
From 1929 to 1932, Daynor spent his days eating whatever he could scrape up—frogs, fish, rabbits, and squirrels—all the while constructing a gigantic palace out of dirt and scrap. Daynor built to palace to prove to every American what he learned from experience: that the Great Depression was not impossible to overcome. In Daynor’s own words, “the only real depression is a depression of individual ingenuity.”
Promoted as “the greatest piece of originality ever brought about in the history of Man,” Daynor’s junk house featured 18 towering spires, a massive outdoor fireplace, a circular shell-covered door, and the Knockout Room, where Daynor would allegedly drop a bowling ball atop your head to erase the worst of your memories.
Unfortunately for Daynor, after hearing about a baby who had recently been kidnapped near the palace, he made the false claim that he was the true kidnapper in a desperate attempt to gain publicity. And publicity he got, but not in the way he would have wanted; Daynor was arrested for over a year on charges of lying to the FBI, and in 1969, long after his death, the Palace of Depression was torn to the ground.
Perhaps, though, the Palace of Depression may see a second life. Nearly 50 years after the destruction of Daynor's junk house, a volunteer-led restoration project of the palace is in progress. It is set to be completed in the coming years.
Creating the world in miniature isn’t easy. The detailed craftsmanship of globe making has been refined over centuries—requiring multiple steps and often multiple artists. In the 1955 video above archived by British Pathé, the skilled globe makers at an unspecified North London firm of geographers take viewers through the fascinating process step-by-step.
The globe makers start by applying thick, brown strips of paper around a wooden ball to create the shell, which is then coated in nine layers of plaster. At the 52-second mark, you can see the globe maker slather fistfuls of the wet plaster over the shell, spinning the sphere so the surface comes out smooth and creamy. This step alone takes about six hours, the narrator explains.
Then the globe gets its geography, which is “like restoring the skin to a peeled orange.” It’s an important step that can significantly affect the end product if there’s an error.
“The covering process calls for a keen eye and a steady hand,” the narrator says. “A fraction of an inch out will put the world miles out of joint.”
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.
