Shigeta Miura really hated Boy Scouts. Now 40 years old, the Tokyo resident was bullied by his fellow troop members. But Miura has had his revenge—for over a year, he's been sending anonymous boxes to his former tormenters, packed full of smelly, soggy retribution.
According to Japan Today, over the course of 14 months, Miura "sent more than 500 garbage items by mail." These included such classics as rotten tea leaves, dirt, and old underwear.
In order to escape detection, Miura would package the garbage, write a random destination on the box, and put his target's info as the return address. Then he would fail to apply a stamp, ensuring that the package would be returned to the "sender." In a way, it was almost as though the recipients had shipped the garbage to themselves.
Police have arrested Miura, who admitted to the charges, cementing his status as 2016's premiere garbage person. Former bullies, watch your backs and your mailboxes this holiday season.
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.
Few things have inspired more poetry and flowery philosophizing than the passage of time. It’s no wonder that the sundial, one of our most ancient and widely used timekeepers, would be the perfect place to inscribe maxims about the transience of life.
Sundials have been around since at least 1500 BCE, but it wasn't until around the 16th century that it became customary in Europe to inscribe them with poems and codas to life, death, and the lessons of time. This helped the sundial evolve from functional timepiece into symbols of our fleeting mortality.
While not the only collection of sundial quotes, one which exemplifies the meaning and importance of sundial codas is a guide called, fittingly, The Book of Sun-Dials. The book was written and compiled by Margaret Gatty, a Victorian children’s book author who also had a passion for collecting seaweed. Gatty was afflicted with illnesses all of her life, likely related to an unidentified case of Multiple Sclerosis, and so during her many instances of convalescence, Gatty was able to indulge in a handful of interesting hobbies, some of which led to published works. The Book of Sun-Dials, originally published in 1872, was her final book, released less than a year before her death.
According to the preface in a later edition of the book, Gatty was inspired to begin cataloguing sundials around 1835 when she began to notice them scattered around the villages of Yorkshire. One 18th-century dial in a local church bore the motto Fugit hora, ora—Latin for “Time flies, pray.” Another church a few miles away held a dial with the inscription “Man fleeth as a shadow.”
As Gatty’s health declined, her collection of mottoes grew. It began to incorporate sundials from all over Europe, thanks to her daughter and a friend who continued to collect sundials they would find in their travels. Even after Gatty passed away in 1873, expanded editions of the book continued to be released as there didn’t seem to be an end to the sundials and mottoes to be found. The fourth edition of the book, released in 1900, featured the locations of over 1,600 sundials and their mottoes.
Many sundial mottoes found in the guide fall into similar themes, with references to time, the sun, shade, death, and light being extremely common. Sometimes the mottoes feature a well-worn saying like “A stitch in time saves nine” or “Sic vita transit,” Latin for “So passes life.” Since many sundials can be found as decorative elements in churches, a great deal of them are written in poetic Latin, giving them an air of august antiquity.
Humorous ruminations on mortality are also popular inscriptions. A dial from 1851 found in France’s Abriès commune features the simple line, “Il est plus tard que vous ne croyez”—“It is later than you think.” A dial found in Surrey reads ”Tenere non potes, potes non perdere diem” (“You can avoid wasting a day, although you cannot hold it.”) At a church in the city of Durham is a dial that states,“The last hour to many, possibly to you.” Another oft-used double entendre is some variation of “Only mark the bright hours,” referring both to an outlook on life, and how a sundial works. Clever.
Some mottoes focus on rhyme, like a dial that was found in Leicestershire that reads, “How we go, shadow show.” Some lean into their poetic inspirations, such as a dial found near Florence that reads, “Della vita il cammin l'astro maggiore, Segna veloce al giusto e al peccatore,” (“The glorious orb of day with breathless speed, To good and bad alike the way of life doth read”). Still others are just depressing, like a Yorkshire dial that reads Disce mori mundo—“Learn to die to the world.”
But to truly understand the art of the sundial inscription one need look no further than the words found on a sundial in Courmayeur, Italy, which reads, “Cette ombre solaire est a la fois, La mesure du temps, et l’image de la vie,” translated from the French, “This solar shadow is at once the measure of time and the symbol of life.”
This poetic tradition of sundial mottoes has fallen a bit out of use as modern dials become both more detailed and more abstract since they are little more than decorative flourishes in the modern age. That said, some people are still cataloguing their locations in places like the British Sundial Society’s fixed dial list, which has brought the spirit of Gatty’s project into the age of crowdsourcing.
It's always nice to come across a bluebell. With their dainty dangling heads and curved petals, they're a welcome pop up in gardens, brighten highway verges, and form purple carpets over otherwise monochrome fields.
But when you spot a bluebell in Britain, it's not always just a pretty diversion. Sometimes, they’re the only visible sign that you’re treading through the middle of a ghost forest.
Once upon a time, Britain was covered in woods—and those woods were full of people. "For millennia, the woods were at the centre of society and economy in ways which today we can barely conceive," writes Ian Rotherham, an environmental studies professor at Sheffield Hallam University. Thanks to the ways in which these people managed the land—and the ways in which the trees and plants, over centuries, have managed themselves—we can spot the traces the woods left behind, in contemporary parks, fields, and even cities. That is, if we know what to look for.
Rotherham has spent about 30 years squinting at barren fields and roadside verges, trying to discern the distant past by looking closely at the present. As he details in a recent paper in Arboricultural Journal, he divides the multilayered landscapes he seeks into two categories: "shadows" and "ghosts." Each term denotes a particular land use history, and comes with its own set of telltale signs.
In 1086, King William commissioned the creation of the so-called Domesday Book, which inventoried all of his kingdom's assets, including wooded commons and pastures, where workers would go to graze livestock, harvest firewood, and burn charcoal. Signs of these early natural-cultural spots, where particular types of human activity intersected with particular types of wilderness, can be seen today. Rotherham calls these traces "shadow woods."
Ghost woods underwent a more deliberate change. By the turn of the second millennium, large swaths of England were known as "manor waste"—land that couldn't be easily grazed or farmed, and which was left available for recreational use by pretty much anyone. But in 1235 AD, after much haranguing by the local barons, King Henry III passed the "Statute of Merton," which allowed lords to enclose parts of this land for their own gain, keeping the plebeians out. "Ghost woods," Rotterham explains, are the remains of these essentially privatized lands, which the lords often tried to turn into pasture.
So how do you spot a ghost wood? Some clues are on paper—old maps and estate records can let you know whether the space you were standing was once someone's private stand of trees. Court rolls might reveal conflict over a space, or paintings of the area may feature a tantalizing woodland in the background. The Domesday Book itself is full of hints (you can even search within it at the National Archives website).
Others require a different kind of detective work. Keep an eye out for "indicator species," shade-friendly plants that tend to crop up during and after long periods of woodland cover. Which plants count as indicators varies by region—in Rotherham's most common place of study, upland England's Peak District, he and his teams look for holly, honeysuckle, and common cow-wheat, a yellow-flowered, high-stalked plant. (Cow-weed is pollinated by ants, so its seeds seldom stray far from their origin point.)
It's also worth taking a second look at any trees around. Individual trees often live for hundreds of years, and bear signs of past use. Keep an eye out for coppices—trees that were once cut near ground level to encourage the regrowth of smaller sticks, which were then harvested for firewood. What once were skinny stems are often now full-grown trees, arranged in a ring around their former base. Trees with corkscrewed trunks or thin branches that stick straight out may have once been grazing trees.
On their own, none of those things make a smoking gun—Rotherham piles up archaeological, ecological, geological and historical evidence before he'll make a case for a spot as a genuine ghost or shadow wood. But with an educated eye, what was once just a weird lumpy tree will whisper clues about its past relationships. And although Rotherham has focused his studies in England and Scotland, he's quick to point out that all landscapes have history that can be divined from careful examination.
If you'd like to see good examples of ghosts and shadows, the Peak District, at the southern end of the Pennines, is a good bet. At Birchwood, in the Derbyshire Hills, you can spot 800-year-old trees, gnarled by human use. Around Matlock, there are remnants of old white charcoal pits. Other researchers have been looking there for evidence of a specific shadow wood, called Deadshaw, that supposedly had "hardy trees" and lasted into the 19th century. So far, they haven't found quite enough evidence to pinpoint it—but Rotherham hasn't lost hope.
"The ghosts are there," he writes. "You only have to look."
If asked to give an example of a great adventure, how many of us would immediately think of Everest? Without question, this tallest of mountains holds a special place in the explorer's psyche. For Tenzing Norgay, the man who with Sir Edmund Hillary would be the first to summit its peak, Everest had been more than an enduring dream—it had also been a constant presence.
In each episode of Horizon Line, Atlas Obscura co-founder Dylan Thuras and associate editor Ella Morton tell the story of a person who pushed the limits of what was believed to be possible. Few people exemplify this better than Norgay, whose immense skill and determination allowed him to stand on top of the world.
Listen to the tale of Norgay's many adventures here, and be sure to subscribe to Horizon Line in iTunes, Google Play, or wherever you get your podcasts from. We would also love your feedback, so be sure to leave a comment and a rating!
It is a truth universally acknowledged (by adults) that youth is irrevocably lost and in need of guidance. Auguste-Jacques Lemiere-d’Ary, an 18th-century French writer and translator, was no exception to this. He was indeed so worried about the lost ways of youth that he took it upon himself to draw a map to guide them along to happiness.
Published in 1802, the Allegorical Map of Youth’s Journey to the Country of Happiness shows the route that any young person who wants to achieve peace must take. The map is so precise that it not only includes a dotted line specifying all the steps, but also gives each step a letter.
Athena, the Greek goddess of reason, stands at the bottom left-hand corner of the map, wrapping a child in her arms as she shows him how to use a compass to navigate the globe. The message is clear: reason is what will guide youths to success in their endeavors.
We begin at Dark Bay (A), from where all youth is thrown clueless and unprepared into the Ocean of Experience (if this is bringing back unpleasant memories of post-graduation life, know that you are not alone). We are then forced to face the Rocks of Obstination and Dissipation (D), two traits that, allegedly, plague all young people.
Things go further downhill at the Mountains of Snow and Ice (E). From there, we journey onto Dissipation Island where we only find misery and bad times (F and G). But the worst is yet to come, as we leave misery behind only to topple onto the Country of Remorse (K), where there’s ennui, thoughtlessness, the Valley of Tears, and the Cape of Pain. So far, nothing but terrible things have happened.
And so we leave the country from the Cape of Repentment and stumble onto Penitence Island (L). Following the Catholic ideal of confession, this is where Lemiere-d’Ary claims the sun starts to smile.
After repenting, we can head over to the of Archipelago of Promises (M), whose two largest islands are those of Docility and Good Will (do we see a pattern here?). We are now ready for the Isle of Efforts (N), because clearly overcoming all the pain and confusion previously encountered in the journey doesn’t really count. Finally, we arrive at the Island of Success (O), where we find satisfaction and reward.
Don’t kick back and throw yourself on a couch just yet! Because the journey isn’t over with success. Oh, no. We must now conquer the large Sands of Patience (P) and try to get through the triangle formed by the three beacons of happiness: Passion, Reason (B), and Religion (W). The triangle is quite perilous, as it is dotted with the Rocks and Chasm of Presumption (V), which can lead you astray—translation: don’t be a self-absorbed fopdoodle.
If we make it through and get to where the Country of Science (S) and the Firm Land of Happiness (T) converge, we will stumble unto the Torrent of Passions (U). Once there, we have access to the many rewards that experience and old age apparently offer, which include gold and diamond mines, Honey Mountain, and an entire forest filled with golden apples.
While it might now seem contradictory to place science and religion in such close ties, especially as it pertains to the happiness of future generations, the map corresponds with the attitude of the time. During the French Revolution and the Reign of Terror, Catholicism and other religions were abolished and heavily persecuted. Robespierre, whose excessive love of the guillotine locked his own fate under its sharp blade, wanted to replace Catholicism with the Cult of Reason.
However, Napoleon Bonaparte, who championed many causes of the revolution (except, you know, freedom from an authoritarian leader), stopped the persecution of the church and restored some of its civil status a year before the map was published. Though Catholicism would never regain the power it held under the Ancien Regime, the map is evidence of how it affected morals and social attitudes during the First Empire.
Lemiere-d’Ary made this map in an attempt to educate youth and guide them to a life of hard work and morality. If we are to take his word for it, then the happy conclusion is that getting old is wonderful. If ever the passage of time throws you into existential angst, just let this map console you.
Map Monday highlights interesting and unusual cartographic pursuits from around the world and through time. Read more Map Monday posts.
In the Wadi Faynan region of southern Jordan, thousands of years ago, people were starting to play with metal. In this area, there’s one of the earliest documented centers of metal extraction in the world, which dates back to the fourth millennium B.C. A team of researchers wondered, though, what happened before that—before they were purposefully extracting it from the earth, how did humans explore the possibilities of metal?
In their exploration, they found an unusual site, a place on the banks of a now-dry waterway that showed evidence of copper contamination. Approximately 7,000 years ago, the researchers hypothesize in their paper, published in the journal Science of the Total Environment, a group of people gathered copper ores, brought them a few kilometers to the banks of a stream, and put those metals into very hot fires.
They did this often enough that they created unusually high concentrations of copper in this one spot —which the research suggest could be considered “the first polluted river.”
Why were people throwing copper ore into the fire? It’s not clear, of course, at this distance in time. It’s likely that they weren’t yet purposefully smelting the copper into shapes, but they might have been using it for “fun, enquiry, ritual and/or spiritual reasons,” the researchers write. As they point out, the combination of metal and fire would have created “multi-colored flames,” and it’s easy to imagine the pull of a dancing rainbow fire on the banks of a small stream.
Eventually, this sort of ritual and flame might have led to the creation of metallurgy. What we know most clearly is the in this one spot, there’s a strange concentration of copper, and it can’t be attributed to natural causes. Humans did this, and it’s one of the earliest examples we have of the permanent waste our activities leave behind.
Nestled on the main castle road, this museum is devoted to classical depictions of Jesus' birth, including the Czech Republic's largest mechanical nativity scene. The museum houses dozens of nativity scenes, a craftwork that goes back far into Czech history.
Crèches, or nativity scenes, were a part of newly Catholic Czech Christmas celebrations in the 17th century, but when Emperor Joseph II outlawed them they only grew more ingrained in the festivities. While before the nativity displays had mostly been part of religious celebrations, after the edict they moved into the home. Every family would have one (even the poorest could make them from paper) and they remained an essential part of decorating for a Czech Christmas.
Most of the scenes in the museum are carved from wood, though some are made from more unusual materials like wax, sugar, or gingerbread. The museum's biggest draw (aside from all the tiny baby Jesuses of course) is that some of the dioramas are mechanized. Children are encouraged to flip the switch and watch the miniature automata whir into action.
Another charming piece is the largest mechanical nativity scene in the country, the Karlštejn Royal Nativity Scene, stored in its own special room in the museum's attic. It is roughly 260 square feet, and incorporates Czech folklore into the biblical tale. The scene uses the famous Karlštejn Castle as its setting, along with notable characters from Czech history. Along with Mary, Joseph, and baby Jesus in the manger, Santa Claus carries a wheelbarrow full of grapes from a vineyard. Ten Czech kings bring gifts of to the manger, while jousters compete in front of the castle, all to the tune of Czech composer Bedřich Smetana's Má vlast, "My homeland."
It's unclear what, if anything, Trump will do to extricate himself from this web of connections. But if he simply wants his brand to proliferate, he shouldn't worry about staying tied up in them—other people are glad to do that for him.
Exhibit A: "Trump Fish," a seafood spot in Duhok, Kurdistan. According to the Duhok Post, the restaurant is a brand new venture. Photos show a cafe-sized space, covered in photos of fish—along with a logo by David Rappoccio, ripped from an UPROXX post imagining what different NFL mascots would look like if teams rebranded for the new administration. (The fish store's image is from the Trumpified San Diego Chargers.)
Questions about Trump Fish remain: Is Fish Delight on the menu? Are there pufferfish in the tanks? How long before they get sued by the President of the United States? In this brave new world, anything can happen.
Every day, we track down a fleeting wonder—something amazing that’s only happening right now. Have a tip for us? Tell us about it! Send your temporary miracles to cara@atlasobscura.com.
A version of this post originally appeared on Tedium, a twice-weekly newsletter that hunts for the end of the long tail.
With Black Friday past us, this is about the time of year when gift lists start being written by kids who are still fairly new to writing.
Over the years, toys like Teddy Ruxpin and the Super Nintendo floated up to the top of many of these lists. But those toys have faded away, for the most part. Power Wheels, on the other hand?
The battery-driven cars are very much still with us, still in stores, and still likely to be on many kids' lists this year.
But to those who didn’t own one of these glorified go-carts when growing up, here’s the thing: Power Wheels are tiny. They barely even fit two little kids. The problem is, kids constantly grow, as any parent who buys clothes will tell you, and kids quickly outgrow their Power Wheels.
So what do you do with them after you’re done? (Hint: the answer involves either hacking or mud.) Let’s ponder the coolest gift that a six-year-old can ever hope for.
As ideas for toys go, a miniature version of the 20th century’s greatest product, designed for kids, was obvious.
But it did not happen overnight. And while Power Wheels appeared to come out in the late ‘80s as a fully-formed branding machine, it was actually a product formed from quite a bit of evolution. At the center of this evolution was an Italian company named Peg-Pérego. The firm, which got its start in 1949 by selling baby carriages, slowly moved into the business of selling toys built for riding.
At first, this meant car-shaped toys with wheels and pedals, but Peg-Pérego eventually had the idea to shove a gel cell battery into these wheeled machines, and suddenly, the product line was off to the races. The firm launched a subsidiary called Pines of America, which started selling these rechargeable machines in toy stores around the U.S. under brand names like Traffic Patrol and Trail Blazer.
In the early ‘80s, the Italian firm sold off Pines of America to a firm called Kransco, which took Peg-Pérego’s great idea and properly branded it.
(Peg-Pérego, by the way, is still around, and is essentially Power Wheels’ biggest competitor, with the Italian company deciding to compete with its old subsidiary after it noticed the growth they were having. Its biggest claim to battery-powered fame is its line of miniature John Deere tractors.)
By 1985, Pines of America was selling three kinds of Power Wheels (a retro-looking “classic convertible,” an ATV-style vehicle, and a miniature monster truck) to the public.
And like actual cars, they had their design flaws. If you’ve owned a Power Wheels device, you know that they’ve experienced a number of recalls over the years, and that trend started really early—before they even took on the Power Wheels name. As the first Power Wheels even hit the market, the Consumer Product Safety Commission was recalling its predecessor due to overheating caused by a short circuit.
But those risks couldn’t stop the interest in these extremely expensive toys. In 1986, Pines introduced its first Jeep to the scene, and from there, numerous other models slowly began to appear—more than 100 in all over the years.
The vehicles were never incredibly powerful—their speeds, generally a slow putter, top out around five miles an hour due to the limited voltage of the devices (6 volts for smaller devices, 12 volts for larger ones). But on television, they looked a lot faster, and that was enough to get kids hooked.
(If you want a faster one for your kids, by the way, look to Peg-Pérego, which sells its devices at higher voltages than commonly seen on Power Wheels.)
Despite the slow speeds, the power of Power Wheels couldn’t be ignored. Mattel purchased Kransco in 1994, a $254.6 million purchase (according to the toy giant’s 1995 10-K annual report) that made Mattel the largest American toymaker. It was largely driven by Power Wheels’ success.
Despite the fact that Kransco had the venerable Wham-O brand under its wing, Power Wheels vehicles made up as much as 80 percent of Kransco’s sales in 1994, according to the Los Angeles Times. And 80 percent of $170 million is no joke.
Considering that miniature motorized vehicles probably cost a lot more per unit than a hula hoop, the high revenue total makes sense to a degree, but it also points to the success of the brand, which soon found a home with Fisher-Price, another Mattel acquisition. It’s been there ever since.
The success of Power Wheels means that sometimes, the battery-powered cars are associated with the kinds of actions that actual full-sized vehicles are.
That includes theft. In 1997, for example, four parents were forced to pay $254 each to the family of a Maine child whose Power Wheels jeep was stolen, according to Mental Floss.
The jeep was stolen by a trio of adolescent girls who repainted the vehicle black and removed the decals. When word surfaced that the vehicle had been stolen, the parents broke the car into pieces in an effort to hide the evidence—a cover-up that led to the fine. The best crimes are the ones that involve enabling your young children.
More commonly, Power Wheels have been associated with the kind of mass recalls that their larger cousins are known for. In 2001, Mattel was fined $1.1 million over a series of flaws in its Power Wheels products, a record fine at the time for a toymaker, later outdone by Mattel itself.
The problem was less about the misdeed itself (Power Wheels had a bunch of defects) and more about the cover-up (they knew about the problems with the cars for 14 years before doing anything).
“When a company hides problems, it means dangerous products continued to be sold and people can be hurt,” noted Ann Brown, the chairwoman of the Consumer Product Safety Commission at the time. “If they reported, we might have prevented some of these fires and injuries.”
Since then, the company has doubled down on safety in regards to Power Wheels, with a page on the Fisher-Price website talking about the tiny cars like you’re buying a freaking F-150.
Power Wheels is obviously still a big deal today, but the concept has been around long enough that there’s a degree of nostalgia attached to the devices.
A lot of objects that came to prominence in the ‘80s—think Casio keyboards and retro video games—have gained some modern cultural currency as hacked-apart artifacts with their full colors exposed. (And yes, in case you’re wondering: Teddy Ruxpin hacking is a thing.)
Power Wheels, with its multiple recalls, tiny sizes, and branded designs, also lend themselves to such hacking, complete with a community to boot. Most commonly, Power Wheels modders will rev up the voltage on the vehicles so that they go a little faster (and freak out spouses in the process), though some might add headlights, or add radio control to the vehicles. One modder recently featured on Hackadayadded a speedometer and high-intensity LEDs, among other things, to an old Peg-Pérego.
But perhaps the true place where Power Wheels shine in the modern day is a tad bit more, uh, deconstructive. It’s a sport of sorts called Extreme Barbie Jeep Racing, a variation on offroading that involves taking used Power Wheels machines and racing them down a hill in dramatic fashion, taking all the bumps that come with. You might start with the mini-Hummer, but you likely won’t end with it in one piece.
Wait until the Consumer Product Safety Commission hears about this.
All this modding and destruction is great, obviously, and you have to wonder whether Mattel is taking some inspiration from it in building out newer Power Wheels models.
To put it simply, they are—and they’re not alone. Earlier this year, Radio Flyer made some waves when they launched a miniature version of the Tesla Model S—another, slightly more powerful vehicle that also happens to rely on battery power. The device is totally decked out, and comes with working headlights and a built-in audio system. You can get it in four different coats of paint and with two kinds of wheels. Like its parent car, it’s incredibly expensive—to Power Wheels what a Tesla is to GM.
Perhaps it’s absurd to think that decked-out toy cars with power lock brakes and MP3 player hookups are a thing. But on the other hand, today’s kids are all going to be riding in self-driving cars when they grow up, so this may be the only experience they get behind the wheel.
Might as well emulate the experience as best as possible.
A version of this post originally appeared on Tedium, a twice-weekly newsletter that hunts for the end of the long tail.
The Adriatic Sea boasts many highly touted beaches featuring clear water, white sand, and gorgeously rugged landscapes. However, the looming rocky towers of Torre Sant'Andrea make the waterfront of this small Italian fishing community stand out even within that generally picturesque context.
The sea stacks that define Torre Sant'Andrea are created by the erosive power of wind and waves beating against malleable coastal cliffs. Fissures are expanded, tunnels are formed, and tenuous natural bridges collapse to leave lonely sentinels rising above the pounding surf below.
Located on the "heel" of Italy's "boot," Torre Sant'Andrea takes its name not from these natural towers, but from one constructed by humans in the 16th century as a watch towers, the ruins of which can still be seen. Visitors can lounge on the beach, swim through weathered arches, and even cliff dive (if they know what they're doing). The local nightlife also apparently features a fairly active reggae scene.
For a certain type of bookish kid (or, let’s be honest, adult), living in the library sounds like a dream. But when the Clark family moved into the Washington Heights branch of the New York Public Library in the late 1940s, their teenage son Ronald Clark was skeptical.
“Kids are strange,” he says. “We always want to be normal. So at first I was a little ashamed that I lived in a library.” His family had moved from a small town in Maryland, where everyone knew each other, for his father, Raymond, to take a job as the library’s custodian.
Soon enough, though, Clark realized the advantages of his new home. “I thought—wait a minute, I’ve got a building to myself with every book in the world,” he says. He decided he liked it. “After a few years, my friends would introduce me and say, ‘This guy lives in the library. Literally—he lives in the library!’”
Today, only a small number of these hidden library apartments are left in New York City. They’re empty and neglected now, and are slowly being converted into modern areas for technology and language programs since the library system needs more space.
Just this year, the apartment that Clark grew up in was renovated so that the space could be used for library programming. Clark and his daughter, Jamilah, who spent the first years of her life living in the same apartment, came back for the first time in decades for a ribbon-cutting ceremony of the converted rooms.
Back in his former home, Clark said that living the library had been a life-changing experience. Before moving there, he had not been a bookish kid, and no one in his family had graduated from high school. But while residing in the library, he started paying attention to books. Every time he read something new, he was amazed. He found himself walking past stacks of books and picking out titles to take to a library table, or going downstairs at all hours of the night to read.
One of the defining moments of his life, he says, is a night that he was lying in bed, thinking about the contradictions between the scientific concept of evolution and the biblical concept of creation. He got up at 2 a.m., went down the stairs, turned on the light, and went to the religion section to pick out a Bible. He laid it side by side with an encyclopedia that detailed evolution and started reading.
“I read each section, and found out—the world was underwater, then fish, then reptiles, then mammals, and lastly humans. I realized, it was exactly the same thing,” in both books, he says. “When I realized that, that changed the way I view the world.”
Living in the library gave him a desire for knowledge, he says, which led him to became the first person in his family to graduate high school and go on to college. During the ceremony, he spoke about passing that desire on to his daughter, who lived in the apartment until she was about five.
One of her favorite memories is going down to the library’s second floor—the children’s floor—with her grandfather when he was cleaning it. “I would have full run of the floor, and the books, and the puzzles, and everything that was down there,” she said. On Sundays, too, after the library closed, she would go downstairs to hang out, read books, and lay on the children’s mats with the puzzle pieces.
“It didn’t feel weird that we lived in a library because it was all I knew,” she says. “This was our home. It wasn’t until I was older that I realized that everybody does not have a lot of books in their house. I didn’t even have the concept of library, just that I lived in a place with tons of books, everywhere, and I could read them and play with them.”
Living in a library, she says, was as great as any book lover would imagine. “It’s magical,” she says. On Sunday, after the library closed, the whole place belonged to the family. Ronald Clark remembers quiet Sunday afternoon dinners, and looking out the windows to see the city resting before them.
Today, after a $4.4 million renovation, the soaring storage room where Jamilah Clark put on puppet shows and learned to ride a bike has become a bright and open programming area for teenagers. The apartment where the family lived has become a series of modern rooms intended for language classes and technology programs.
But it still feels familiar, in some ways, to the Clarks. “The inside is totally different, but the space is still the same and the windows are still the same, so it has both the old and the new,” says Ronald Clark. “I feel nostalgic about the old but I really truly am excited about the new.”
Cuban artist José Fuster's art is "naïve," meaning he uses childlike crude shapes and bright colors in his untrained composition. His work has been compared to that of Picasso, a comparison that followed him in successful gallery tours across Europe.
After one such tour, Fuster was struck with a desire to recreate something like Gaudi's public works in Barcelona and Brâncuși's across Romania in his own homeland. He wanted to put his artistic reality into his real-world surroundings, and he began in his own neighborhood.
In 1975, after moving into a modest wood house in the rundown neighborhood of Jaimanitas outside Havana, Fuster set about decorating his studio in colorful mosaic. Once he was done there, he asked his neighbors if he could decorate their homes and business as well. A few accepted his offer and the tile creations grew. Over the course of a decade, doctors' offices, bus stops, fountains, benches, gateways, and more were enveloped by Fuster's whimsical imagination. Today, his artwork coats the neighborhood in a rainbow of strange, enchanting fantasy.
Jaimanitas was an economically depressed area before Fuster arrived, and now it has turned into an artist's paradise. Tourists are bussed into the neighborhood to admire Fuster's still-growing kingdom, which has spawned a new generation of artists inspired by the surroundings they came up in.
Ruby Falls Cave has all the geological features one would expect (stalactites, stalagmites, etc.) with one magical addition: an underground waterfall. Until humans tunneled into the cave in the 19th century, the water had been trickling undiscovered beneath Tennessee for roughly 200 million years.
The cave system, called Lookout Mountain Caverns, had been used for shelter as far back as the Civil War, likely even earlier. But when a railroad was built to intersect with the caves, they were sealed shut. It wasn't until amateur spelunker Leo Lambert tunneled higher up the mountainside to reopen the caverns that the underground waterfall was exposed to the light of day.
Lambert named the falls for his wife, Ruby, and opened them to the public. They became a popular tourist destination, advertised across the South on barns painted with the slogan "See Ruby Falls." The caves and the underground waterfall were some of the first such attractions to be electrically lit. The light display continues to wow visitors, as its hues melt into one another on the cavern walls.
In rural Rushes Cemetery, one headstone stands out from the rest. Rather than the usual RIP, the Bean grave marker is etched with a crossword code. A message below the code urges, "Reader meet us in heaven."
Dr. Samuel Bean's first wife, Henrietta, died just seven months after the two were married. His second wife, Susanna, also met her untimely end after only a few months of marital bliss. Bean buried his two loves side by side, erected the mysterious tombstone above them and didn't tell a soul what it meant. He took that secret to his watery grave when he was lost overboard a boat heading to Cuba.
The epitaph drew curious visitors attempting to break the code to the little town of Wellesley over the following century. So many people came to make rubbings of the headstone that by the 1980s it was entirely illegible and had to be replaced with a replica. The cemetery groundskeeper claimed he had cracked it in the 1940s, but never revealed the answer. In the 1970s a 94-year-old woman solved the code and told what Dr. Bean had written for his two wives (read no further if you would rather solve the code yourself.)
Beginning on the seventh character of the seventh row down and reading in a zig-zag fashion, the inscription reads: "In memoriam Henrietta, Ist wife of S. Bean, M.D. who died 27th Sep. 1865, aged 23 years, 2 months and 17 days and Susanna his 2nd wife who died 27th April, 1867, aged 26 years, 10 months and 15 days, 2 better wives 1 man never had, they were gifts from God but are now in Heaven. May God help me so to meet them there."
A random walk through the narrow residential streets of Yokohama can often lead to unexpected discoveries. Like stumbling on an unassuming little house that’s a toy museum, home of one of the world’s largest vintage tin toy collections.
In the tight space of a couple of rooms the club director’s "Kitahara Collection" can fill you with nostalgia, and maybe a touch of the creeps.
The toys range from the 1890s through the 1960s, a kind of “golden age” for tin toys. Most of them were made in Japan, and all were amassed by Teruhisa Kitahara, the author of several books on vintage toys and one of the world's preeminent collectors. Kitahara has been hunting down tin toys and wind-ups since the 1970s, and the examples on display in his little museum are all part of his personal collection.
The museum, which includes a small shop where you can buy some tin toys for yourself, was opened to the public in 1986. It became a way for Kitahara to share his spinning acrobats, chiming monkeys, toy planes, and mini railroads for all toy fans. There are some quirks in the collection too, like the Creature from the Black Lagoon staring out at all the toys from a glass case on the floor. Maybe he’s the security guard.
If you think about silent-film era sex symbols, you probably conjure up a mental picture of Rudolph Valentino—even if you don’t know his name. Valentino has become synonymous with sex appeal in early films. But he wasn’t the first male star of American movies to make millions of American women go weak at the knees. That distinction goes to Sessue Hayakawa, the Japanese star of Cecil B. DeMille’s cinematic rape drama, The Cheat.
This 1915 film was a huge hit in spite of (or more likely because of) the fact that it lasciviously hinted at a taboo subject: interracial sex. The titular “cheat” (Fannie Ward) depicted in the film is a materialistic, dishonest tease. Hayakawa, who plays her neighbor, starts out as one kind of Asian stereotype (a polite gentleman), but turns out to be an entirely different one (a swarthy predator).
The possibility that an Asian man might be a more appealing sex partner for a white Long Island matron than her middle-aged Caucasian husband was too transgressive a notion for DeMille to fully commit to; he has Hayakawa, after spending much of the film chastely escorting Ward’s vapid socialite around, metamorphose rather abruptly into a sadistic rapist.
The Cheat made Hayakawa an international star. America’s teenage girls and swooning housewives fell for his charms, but French intellectuals like the novelist Colette and Polish-born filmmaker Jean Epstein sang his praises too. Film historian Daisuke Miyao begins his 2007 study of Hayakawa with the words of Miyatake Toyo, a Japanese photographer working in America in the early 20th century, who called Hayakawa “the greatest movie star in this century” and described a scene of female fans throwing their fur coats at the star’s feet to prevent him from stepping in a puddle. If People magazine had existed during the late 1910s, Hayakawa would have undoubtedly been declared the “Sexiest Man Alive.”
Hayakawa was born in 1890 to a wealthy family in Japan, and was expected to eventually work in the family fishing business. In his late teens, Hayakawa was sent to the University of Chicago to study political economy. Several years later, he drifted to Los Angeles where he began working in local theatre and abandoned his given name, Kintarō, in favor of the stage name Sessue (which was pronounced and occasionally even spelled Sesshū).
There, he met influential producer Thomas H. Ince, as well as a Japanese actress named Tsuru Aoki. Ince cast both Hayakawa and Aoki in his Japan-themed films, and in 1914, the two young actors married. The following year, The Cheat made Hayakawa a major star, and the Hayakawas became one of Hollywood’s golden couples.
Hayakawa remained popular for the second half of the 1910s, although he was often relegated to stereotyped non-white roles like "Chinese gangster" or "Indian doctor. In 1918, he formed his own production company, Haworth Pictures, in large part because of his dissatisfaction with the material he was being offered. He told a fan magazine the year after the release of The Cheat that the roles he had been playing “are not true to our Japanese nature….They are false and give people a wrong idea of us.”
The 1919 Haworth film The Dragon Painter, a kind of fairy tale about a mad Japanese artist searching for his manic pixie dream girl, is not devoid of stereotyping, but it at least tried to do something other than exploit the fear that Asian men constitute a threat to the purity of white women.
Around 1920, Hayakawa’s career started to falter. Miyao suggests that Hayakawa fell victim to a growing tide of anti-Japanese sentiment in the wake of the more-militant Japan that emerged after World War I. Hayakawa worked in Europe for a while, and then eventually returned to Hollywood a decade later. In 1931, he starred opposite Chinese-American actress Anna May Wong in the silly Fu Manchu talkie, Daughter of the Dragon. Although now in early middle age, Hayakawa was just as handsome as ever. Still, his heavy accent and his Japanese nationality made him a tough sell to the movie-going public.
Furthermore, Hollywood’s preference for white actors in all sorts of roles—including explicitly Asian ones—had a devastating impact on the careers of Asian actors. For example, Hayakawa’s sultry co-star Anna May Wong was an American-born native speaker who should have thrived in talkies. Nevertheless, she kept losing plum “Asian” roles to non-Asian actors, a common casting practice of the time that came to be called “yellowface.”
Indeed, when considering actresses for the film version of Pearl S. Buck’s prize-winning novel The Good Earth, MGM rejected Wong for the lead in favor of German actress Luise Rainer, who’d been unconvincingly made up in faux-Asian makeup. To add insult to Wong’s injury, Rainer went on to win the 1938 Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her performance as a Chinese peasant in the film.
Yellowface lives on, albeit without the garish greasepaint. This year, the makers of Doctor Strange stirred up controversy by replacing a character depicted as Asian in the comic-book source with the white actress Tilda Swinton. Something similar happened with the upcoming Ghost in the Shell, in which Scarlett Johansson will play a Japanese character—with a yellowface supporting cast.
It’s hard not to wonder: Wouldn’t it make more sense just to cast Asian actors? “It’s not that Hollywood can’t find talented people,” says Karla Rae Fuller, a film scholar and author of Hollywood Goes Oriental: CaucAsian Performance in American Film. Citing American audiences’ enthusiasm for the Asian actors in Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon—it was the highest-grossing foreign language film ever in the U.S.—she says that the Hollywood establishment may simply have a hard time imagining the appeal of minority actors. “On the level of logic, it makes no sense. But film is such a powerful medium, and the idea of giving minority groups starring roles, leadership roles—I think people shy away from that.”
San Francisco State University ethnic studies scholar Amy Sueyoshi notes that the Asian stereotypes of the past, including those that catapulted Hayakawa to stardom, have shifted in such a way that Asian men have been marginalized and even “emasculated.” While Asian women continue to be stereotyped as sexually available and desirable, Asian men have been desexualized, she notes. In the 1980s, Japan became an economic powerhouse, which made white Americans anxious about their country’s diminishing dominance, she says. In response, Asian men were stereotyped in pop culture as unmanly and unattractive—that is, not leading man material. (Think of the dorky foreign exchange student Long Duk Dong who crushes on Molly Ringwald in 1984’s Sixteen Candles.)
By the late 1940s, Hayakawa was nearing his sixties, but his age didn’t prevent him from enjoying a late-career renaissance in Hollywood. In 1949, he made Tokyo Joe with Humphrey Bogart and in 1950, Three Came Home with Claudette Colbert. Around that time Hollywood started to take a new interest in Japan—and Asian-Caucasian romance—leading to the release of films such as 1955’s House of Bamboo, directed by Samuel Fuller, and 1957’s Sayonara, about an Air Force fighter pilot, played by Marlon Brando, who falls in love with a Japanese woman.
Hayakawa appeared as a Tokyo detective in Fuller’s film, and shortly afterwards British director David Lean gave him the role he’s now best remembered for: Colonel Saito in the 1957 film The Bridge on the River Kwai. While Hayakawa was again asked to embody a racial stereotype—he played a cruel, inscrutable Japanese prison camp commandant—his performance is skillful and nuanced. Indeed, he was nominated for the Best Supporting Actor Oscar, although he lost to Red Buttons, a white actor in Sayonara, for his role as a doomed American soldier married to a Japanese woman.
Miyoshi Umeki, the actress playing Buttons’ Japanese wife, won Best Supporting Actress that year for her role in the same film. Those two nominations for Asian actors in one year was a fluke; since then, starring roles and film-acting awards for Asians haven’t been plentiful. In fact there have only been nine more Asian actors nominated for acting Oscars since Umeki’s win. The only Asian actors to have won acting Oscars are Ben Kingsley (Best Actor in 1982’s Gandhi) and Haing S. Ngor (Best Supporting Actor in 1984’s The Killing Fields).
The fact that Kingsley, who is of Indian descent, was already a successful actor in the U.K. before Gandhi suggests that Asian actors need to establish themselves abroad before getting a shot at mainstream American success. That’s certainly true of 2016’s honorary Oscar winner Jackie Chan, a Hong Kong action star who managed to parlay his homegrown popularity into a U.S. career. (Ngor’s case is one-of-a-kind; a non-professional when he landed the role in The Killing Fields, it was his real-life experiences as a prisoner of the Khmer Rouge that led to his casting.)
While attesting to the youthful Hayakawa’s electrifying presence at the height of his fame, photographer Miyatake Toyo wrote: “Never again will there be a star like Sessue.” It’s true that no Asian actor working in American film in the past century has been able to attain a similar level of stardom—and for that, Hollywood casting agents should be ashamed.
Space farming is now officially a thing. After proving that lettuce grown entirely in space was safe to eat back in 2015, NASA has announced that the first crop of orbital veggies has now been cultivated exclusively for consumption by the crew.
This latest crop of “Outredgeous” red romaine lettuce grown entirely on the International Space Station, operation name, Veg-03 and spearheaded by NASA astronaut Shane Kimbrough, is the newest step in NASA’s ongoing efforts to create a sustainable, renewable food source aboard their spacecraft. The first space lettuce eaten by American astronauts (Veg-01) was produced back in 2015, and was sampled both plain, and with balsamic vinegar by the ISS crew. Astronaut hero Scott Kelly said at the time that it tasted like arugula.
Having proven that a safe form of produce could grow in orbit, testing continued, trying to develop the best method to keep the modest crop producing in the station’s microgravity, facing challenges such as how to get the plants the right amount of water and light. The plants, which are rooted in a specialized grid of “pillows” that hold the seeds in place, receive the necessary amount of light from a mix of red, blue, and green LEDs, and are fed water from a secondary system. Although according to NASA’s press release on the Veg-03 harvest, they almost overwatered the plants, before coming up with the idea to dry them out using a fan. Space is the mother of invention.
With the basics seemingly in hand, the lettuce on the ISS is now being carefully harvested using a “cut-and-come-again” technique which leaves some of the leaves and the core of the plant intact, so that it can quickly regrow, to be harvested repeatedly. This type of sustainable food production is the first step in solving one of the major problems with manned deep space travel.
For the first time, there are now six Outredgeous lettuce plants now in full growth aboard the station, and the small harvest that took place last week will be used entirely for crew consumption. The astronauts on the ISS plan on getting three more harvests out of the plants before having to grow new samples.
In Pompano Beach, Florida, the Salvation Army has discovered two very unusual coins in its one of its collection kettles, the Sun Sentinel reports. Among the quarters, dimes, and dollars, they found two 50-peso Mexico coins, made of gold and dated to 1947.
Each one of these gold coin is worth $1,400, according to the Sun Sentinel.
What’s most amazing about this find, though, is that this is the third year in a row that it’s happened. Since 2014, gold coins have been turning up in Salvation Army collection kettles stationed at Walmarts around Pompano Beach. Last year there were five gold coins found in total. The year before, there are three gold Mexican coins and two American ones. Whoever left the coins wrapped them in $1 bills to conceal the donation.
The Broward County Salvation Army isn’t the only one to receive gold coin donations, though. In Horseheads, New York, volunteers found a gold coin worth $100. In North Carolina, volunteers found a U.S. Gold Eagle $5 coin from 1881, which could be worth thousands of dollars.In Springfield, Ohio, the gold coin came from South Africa. In Spokane, Wash., gold coins have been found for the past seven years—and this year the coin was wrapped in an $100 bill and a letter from the donor saying that, because of his age, this might the last year he could drop a special coin in the bucket.
