Every year, thousands of fires begin in the American wilderness. Most of these fires are remote, sparking and burning in the deep, deep backcountry. And over the last hundred years, brave men and women, known as smokejumpers, have parachuted in to extinguish them.
In previous episodes of Horizon Line, co-hosts Dylan Thuras and Ella Morton have told stories of peril and adventure from history. In the last episode of this season, they speak firsthand to someone who has lived a life full of both—retired smokejumper Rod Dow.
Dow spent 32 years working as a smokejumper, primarily in Alaska and the Pacific Northwest. At the time of his retirement from smokejumping in 1999, he held the record for number of fire jumps, at 276. Dow's book, Just A Few Jumper Stories, is a collection of 70 true stories from his time "flying around at low altitude in very cool jump ships, parachuting into wild country in Alaska and the western states, combating wildfire, at times, with huge ripping flame fronts, and drinking camp coffee with a nip of whiskey in it around campfires with some of the best people I ever met."
Listen to some of Dow's smokejumper tales 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!
Two figures meet each other face to face. The sharp edges of their geometric bodies are perfect for their precise movements and the lined universe that surrounds them. The entire scene is so perfectly mathematical, it may take you a couple of seconds to realize these are human dancers and not archaic animations.
One of the most celebrated yet surprisingly obscure works associated with the Bauhaus School in Germany, The Triadic Ballet is an avant-garde exploration of space, dance, and the human body. It came from the brilliant mind of Oskar Schlemmer, a painter, sculptor, dancer, and designer, amongst many other things. Obsessed with the idea of freeing art from its restrictions, he used choreographed geography to push the boundaries of the way we use our body. His strange, captivating, and somewhat eerie ballet was performed from 1922 to 1929, when it fell victim to the stock market crash that brought the western world to its knees.
The ballet has been reproduced several times. This particular video is from a 1970s reproduction, which sought to be as faithful to Schlemmer’s idea as possible. Sadly, much of what we see are assumptions taken from notes and pictures. Since his work was declared part of the “Degenerate Art” by the Nazis, much of it was lost.
If three-and-a-half minutes of being under the spell of The Triadic Ballet are not enough, you can enjoy the full version of the performance:
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.
While out on Muriwai beach, not far from Auckland, New Zealand, Melissa Doubleday came across the strange object above. Draped with thick, rope-like material, almost like a wild yak, the object was not immediately identifiable.
Plenty of ideas came in: could it be an alien time capsule? A Maori canoe? A sea monster’s discarded dreadlocks?
The long tentacles and white shells that decorate the creature/object are actually pretty easily identifiable—they’re gooseneck barnacles. The barnacles grow those long, fleshy necks, which attach to rocks or other solid material in the ocean. They depends on the ocean currents to move them through the water and help them feed.
What’s underneath all those barnacles? Probably just a giant piece of driftwood. But even if it's not some alien craft, it's a very impressive piece of driftwood and very impressive work by the barnacles.
Back in the 1970s, David Newbury's dad, Paul, worked at Carnegie Mellon, one of the leading computer science schools in the country. This was in the very early years of the Internet, back when it was the secret and very small ARPANET, which had started in the late '60s, with just four locations. By 1973, it had expanded to a small handful of government labs, research universities, and private companies—but still so few that the entire network could be mapped on a single sheet of paper.
Recently, Newbury found that map among his dad's papers and posted it online. You can find Stanford, UCLA, Utah and UCSB, the original members, but by 1973, ARPANET had expanded east, to Case Western, Carnegie Mellon, Harvard, and MIT. There are government labs, like Lawrence Berkeley National Lab and the Army's Aberdeen Ballistic Research Lab, and private research organizations like MITRE and Xerox.
ARPANET grew quickly, though. By 1977, here's what the map looked like:
This map, though, came with a caveat. This was the "best information obtainable"—but perhaps not entirely accurate. Already the network was growing so wildly it was impossible to know exactly how far it stretched.
By now, you've probably heard that eating bugs is in your future. Insects are protein-rich and efficient to farm, and the UN has predicted we'll largely be surviving off of beetle bites and caterpillar consommé by 2050. Chefs are already whipping up recipes for curried grasshoppers, buffalo worm nuggets, and chocolate mealworm spread—although, of course, the easiest way of tucking in to these delicacies is just eating the insects whole. So what's stopping you?
Maybe your tongue has a few questions. But if it's merely the lack of an appropriate utensil that is holding you back, designer Wataru Kobayashi has you covered. In his new project, BUGBUG, Kobayashi introduces a set of cutlery that'll have you gleefully crunching exoskeletons, scooping scorpions, and sinking your teeth into a different style of wing.
When Kobayashi first heard the UN's prediction, he thought of one of his own favorite snacks—chicken giblets. Although they're a common dish in his homeland of Japan, many cooks elsewhere don't think of them as food, and throw them away without a second thought. If he had grown up somewhere else, Kobayashi says, "I would never have known the taste."
Bugs face similar barriers on their journey to become a global foodstuff. "People seem not to take [the idea of] eating insects positively or seriously," he says. "We haven't prepared to eat insects as a daily meal."
So Kobayashi decided to make it easier to imagine. The BUGBUG starter set contains five utensils: two sets of spear-ended chopsticks (one long pair and one short), a paddle for crushing and scooping, a fork with tiny tines, and, most intriguingly, a set of extremely precise pincers that fit over the bearer's thumb and middle finger.
Each is made of sustainable, long-lasting materials, like brass and cherrywood, and the whole set comes with a vegan-leather carrying case and a set of small, suspiciously petri-like dishes. Promotional pictures depict a perfect hipster picnic: diners spear grubs and scarf scorpions alongside hummus, red wine, and a cream-cheese-and-mealworm sandwich.
You can't get your paws on BUGBUG yet—it is, thus far, just a prototype. And if history is any guide, early adopters should expect some backlash. When the dinner fork was first brought to Europe, by noblewoman Maria Argyropoulina in 1004 A.D., it was met with jeers and condemnation ("God in his wisdom has provided man with natural forks—his fingers," one local clergyman insisted).
Times change, though, and it helps to be prepared. When the bug-eating future inevitably arrives, are you really going to want to start with your hands?
Everyone celebrates the holidays a little differently. While their countrymen 600 miles south in Gävle burn Christmas goat after Christmas goat, the good people of Gellivare, Sweden spent this past weekend lit aflame by something else—the competitive fire of the annual Santa Winter Games.
The Santa Winter Games, also known as the Santa World Cup and the Santa Olympics, finds wannabe Kringles from across the globe competing in various cutthroat, festive tasks. Although they insist that the tradition "began in the deep forest," the Games are currently put on in the Gellivare town square, by the town's tourism board.
Events this year included present-wrapping, tree-decorating, lasso-throwing (for reindeer, maybe?) and, of course, a dance-off. Past competitions have featured mechanical reindeer-riding, porridge-eating, and sled-pushing.
After 12 years of being trounced by Santas from elsewhere, Sweden's home team—Santa Jocke and his helper, Santa Harmångernissen—got top honors this year. Silver went to Santas Jim and Johnny of China, while Santa Apple and Santa Kiwi of Hong Kong took third.
According to the Local, Jocke and Harmångernissen locked in their win by demonstrating some excellent jitterbugging in the dance-off. "It felt really great. It wasn't at all what we had imagined," Harmångernissen told Sveriges Radio after it had all sunk in.
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.
It was November 8, 2012, and Timothy Mellon, the son of the late Paul Mellon—once one of the richest men in the world—was ecstatic. The younger Mellon had recently returned from an expedition to the deserted Pacific atoll of Nikumaroro, where some think Amelia Earhart ended up after vanishing in 1937, and his instincts for sleuthing for the truth of the aviator’s disappearance were in overdrive.
Mellon went to Nikumaroro under the aegis of the International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR), a non-profit that has been searching for Earhart for nearly 30 years. He also played a large role in financing the expedition, to the tune of around $1 million. That trip, in the end, didn’t uncover anything definitive, but an earlier TIGHAR expedition, in 2010, had produced an underwater video, which Mellon, then an active participant on TIGHAR’s messaging boards, had spent hours watching. In the course of examining the video, he said that November, he’d spotted something significant in the footage: Earhart’s plane. He could see it all: the tachometer, the altimeter, and a co-pilot’s wheel, among many other things.
Mellon posted about his discovery on a TIGHAR message board, but there was a problem: nobody else could see the plane. So after a couple of weeks, and a lot of rancorous disputes, executive director Richard Gillespie shut down the thread. This should have been the end of the story, but, Gillespie told me last month, it was just the beginning.
“The next thing I know,” Gillespie says, “he sues me.”
These are the basic, knowable facts about Amelia Earhart: On July 2, 1937, she and her navigator, Fred Noonan, disappeared while flying in a Lockheed Model 10 Electra in the South Pacific. They were aiming for Howland Island, about 2,000 miles away from their next destination, Hawaii, and about 4,500 miles short of their ultimate destination, Oakland, California, which would have completed Earhart’s round-the-world trip. But the two never made it. Earhart’s last radio message said that “we are on the line 157 337”—157 degrees to 337 degrees—and “we are running on line north and south.” Or maybe she said “north to south.” Or “north then south.” Or something else entirely. But then came nothing.
The U.S. Navy looked for a few weeks and came up empty-handed, deciding ultimately that Earhart and Noonan crashed and sank into the Pacific Ocean. But almost immediately, there were whispers of conspiracy. This was in part because of brewing tension in East Asia, where Japan and China had already clashed over Japanese incursions into Manchuria. Within a few months of the disappearance, an Australian tabloid reported what it said was the real reason Earhart vanished: to give the U.S. an excuse to search for Japanese military installations.
By the 1970s, there were two prevailing theories: the U.S. Navy’s, which was that the plane crashed and sank, and the more intriguing possibility that Earhart had been captured by the Japanese. By the early 1990s, Gillespie and TIGHAR said they had enough evidence to offer a third theory: that Earhart and Noonan ended up as castaways on Nikumoraro. Today, the three major theories haven’t evolved much—although if you look, there are plenty of supplementary fringe theories from amateur message board detectives. Did she, in fact, crash on New Britain, an island in Papua New Guinea? Or, more improbably, did she survive and live undercover on Long Island under a different name?
We will probably never know. Seventy-nine-year-old mysteries don’t really get solved. They just linger, the perfect breeding ground for even more theories—and, in this case, a lot of animosity.
Take Mike Campbell, who has been writing and researching the Earhart mystery for years now. He’s published a book, Amelia Earhart: The Truth at Last, and for years has written about the mystery and responded to critics on his blog, earharttruth.wordpress.com.
Campbell thinks that Earhart and Noonan were captured by the Japanese and spent months, if not years, on Saipan—a conclusion he’s reached, he says, despite decades of government “propaganda” suggesting otherwise. And he takes a pugilistic approach to those who disagree, which includes, frequently, the media.
“I don't mind talking to media who have some basic understanding about the truth in the Earhart disappearance, but few are interested in the truth anymore,” Campbell told me in our first email exchange. “Gillespie has been milking his phony Nikumaroro cash cow for nearly 30 years, and yet there's still no end in sight to this ridiculous charade. You clearly are uninformed and have been assigned to do a story about TIGHAR's latest false claim … Perhaps in a year or so President Trump might be interested in disclosing the truth about this longtime cover-up, a true American travesty.”
To hear Campbell tell it, the vast conspiracy behind Earhart’s disappearance includes a wide variety of actors, Gillespie among them. “Of course there's something else going on,” Campbell wrote at one point. “It's called "disinformation" and it comes in two main flavors, official and unofficial. How much time do you have to do your story? It's simply not right, if they're interested in the truth, to demand a rush job from someone who simply just began.”
Campbell was right—the Earhart details can get very complicated, very fast. What to make, for example, of claims by American Marines that they saw Earhart’s plane on Saipan, about 2,400 miles northwest of Howland Island? Or the claims of others—some uncovered by Gillespie—who said they saw a plane on Nikumaroro? And what exactly did Earhart mean in her final words over the radio, when she said that she and Noonan were “running on line [north and south]?”
You can spend hours, days, weeks, entire careers shuffling through the details. Gillespie, for one, has file cabinet after file cabinet of newspaper clippings, official documents, and other source materials, taking up a good portion of a room in his Pennsylvania house. Campbell’s book features hundreds of meticulous endnotes after every chapter, each suggesting painstaking due diligence, if not definitive evidence.
But like pretty much any unsolvable mystery, the Earhart question isn’t just about details; it’s a prism that reveals who you really are. To me, the fact that Earhart crashed and sank into the Pacific seems reasonable in an Occam’s Razor kind of way, in that to believe the others would require some effort and imagination. But for Gillespie, who talks frequently and high-mindedly about using real forensic science in the search for the missing aircraft, his approach has centered on creating what he says is an elaborate new academic discipline (or, his critics would say, merely a functioning business). For Campbell, Earhart is the clue to a much larger tale of government cover-ups and conspiracy, a battle against forces that are seen and unseen: the forces hiding the truth.
Among those involved in the cover-up, according to Campbell, is Gillespie, a 69-year-old who has been at this, for better or worse, for around 30 years. It started in 1983, when Gillespie experienced what these days is called a quarter-life crisis. He was 36 then, a married former Army lieutenant who’d spent over a decade rising in the ranks of the aviation insurance industry, investigating accidents and selling policies across the East Coast. His office was on the 17th floor of a building in Center City, Philadelphia. His title was vice president of aviation for an insurance brokerage firm. He was, on paper, successful—where many men of his generation told themselves they should be.
But by 1984, things started to fall apart. He got divorced, which left him more or less broke. Then, after some tension at work, he quit his job. “I did all the stuff I was supposed to do,” Gillespie says. “I got a college degree, I was an Army officer, and it didn’t work out all that well. So, now, I’m going to do what I want to do.”
Gillespie grew up on airplanes thanks to the influence of his father, who was a bomber pilot in World War II. When he joined the Army, he couldn’t fly, owing to less-than-perfect vision, but when he got out he picked up where he left off, spending most of his twenties on airfields. But after he left the brokerage firm, he was for the first time untethered from the world of aviation, and looking for a way back into it. So, in January 1985, with the help of a $35,000 loan and his second wife Pat Thrasher, he founded TIGHAR.
Initially, the group, which Gillespie designed as a member-supported nonprofit, was focused on recovering aircraft that had nothing to do with the Earhart case. Gillespie says he had little interest in the case at the outset, thinking that the best evidence had already been picked over repeatedly through the years. But he changed his mind, he says, with some convincing.
“In ‘88 a couple of our members called up and said, ‘Hey, we’ve got a new theory about Amelia Earhart,’ and I said, ‘I don’t want to hear any new theories about Amelia Earhart.’ And they said, ‘No, you gotta listen.’ So they came, and they spread their maps out on the kitchen table. And to my surprise they didn’t tell any tales of the South Pacific, about what some Marine was told on Saipan,” Gillespie said. “They talked about navigation.”
Within a few years, Gillespie and his group were making headlines across the country.
"We're very confident that the Amelia Earhart case is solved," Gillespie told an “army of reporters” in 1992, according to the Los Angeles Times.
Gillespie said then that he’d found a part of Earhart’s plane, in addition to what looked to be part of Earhart’s shoe (“WE DID IT,” TIGHAR’s newsletter jubilantly reported.) But because the plane part lacked serial numbers or other positively identifying characteristics, it didn’t quite qualify as a smoking gun, or in Gillespie’s words, an “any-idiot artifact—you’re holding on to it and any idiot can see that this is it.” What did he have, then? A piece of metal found on Nikumaroro, which, he says, matches up to the specifications of Earhart’s plane, an opinion shared by a metallurgist from MIT. Gillespie spent the next 24 years collecting more evidence to prove his theory of what he believes happened to Earhart: namely, that she died as a castaway on Nikumaroro, about 372 miles south of Howland Island, where she was headed.
Those decades were punctuated with headline-making news conferences—including one with then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton—that Gillespie hoped would keep the case in the limelight, while he also continuously raised money to finance expeditions by boat to Nikumaroro.
His latest scoop came last month, when TIGHAR announced a new finding: bones recovered on Nikumaroro were consistent with Earhart’s sex, nationality, and measurements. This announcement was met with headlines across the world. “Amelia Earhart’s last chapter was as a heroic castaway,” CNN’s headline blared, even as critics were again quick to throw cold water on Gillespie’s supposed victory.
“The point is that he’s got a theory and so he’s got to prove his theory,” Dorothy Cochrane, who curates aircraft at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum and has long sparred with Gillespie. “This is the greatest mystery of the 20th century. A legitimate excellent pilot, hero, role model, one of the celebrities of the century. She’s an attention-getter and everyone wants to know what happened to her. It’s a legitimate question and interest. But he’s got absolutely nothing that’s definitive and nothing new.”
Cochrane, like her other colleagues at the Smithsonian, believe that Earhart and her navigator, Noonan, crashed and sank. “The problem with that,” she acknowledges, “is that it’s boring, and it’s unprovable at this point unless someone can find her aircraft on the bottom of the ocean.”
Her explanation for Gillespie’s persistence boils down to money. “He’s used the same quote unquote evidence over and over again,” she says. “He does this on a routine basis whenever he wants to mount another expedition … It’s his business. It’s his livelihood.”
Still, Gillespie is hardly making millions off his obsession. TIGHAR’s latest available tax forms indicate the group took in around $700,000 in the tax year ending in June 2015, with $177,372 of that going to Gillespie—which he says is actually payment for both him and his wife, Pat Thrasher, who each work full-time on the non-profit. His home, which doubles as TIGHAR headquarters, is located on a modest farm in rural Pennsylvania, where Gillespie and Thrasher work from the same home office—making calls, firing off emails, planning a 12th expedition to Nikumaroro, and, incidentally, keeping horses and a few chickens. When I visited last month to talk to Gillespie, I found a hen walking around on the porch.
“It’s vicious,” he said of the squabbling among Earhart researchers, which he compared to disputes among religious factions. “And if you can’t refute the guy who says he’s got the true faith, he must be a con man. You shoot the messenger.”
Face to face, Gillespie’s theory of what happened on July 2, 1937, is compelling. Noonan relied on celestial navigation, Gillespie says, but that night the conditions were overcast, making such navigation difficult, if not impossible. This meant that when Noonan and Earhart thought they’d reached Howland Island, they’d actually missed the mark by quite a bit.
“They’ve been in the air at this moment for 19 hours and 12 minutes and sitting between two 550 horsepower engines,” Gillespie says. “They’re deaf. They can’t hear each other. They’re communicating with the little written notes. She makes this radio transmission that says, ‘We must be on you but cannot see you.’”
Going south on a navigational line, he says, they then found Nikumaroro, where they landed on a reef at low tide and tried to send emergency signals to the Navy. At one point, Gillespie produced a presentation to illustrate a complicated theory about when Earhart could be sending emergency signals, which he argued coincided with the tides; if her plane landed at low tide, her radio would have been useless at high tide, when the water would be too high run the plane’s engine and power the radio. Gillespie produced a graph that shows signals that appear to coincide with the tides. After about a week, according to the graph, the signals fade.
Gillespie also walked me through some of the other evidence: a woman who lived on Nikumaroro as a girl, who told them that in the 1940s her father pointed out the wreckage of what he said was a plane. And then there is a mysterious photograph taken by the British three months after Earhart’s disappearance, which a forensics expert said shows an unnatural object consistent with what would be parts of a Lockheed Electra. Gillespie took that photograph to experts at the State Department, where he had developed contacts. “Basically we see what your guy sees,” he says they told them, but refused to give him a written report—to avoid irritating higher-ups, he says.
Still, in February 2012, Gillespie met with Kurt Campbell, who was then assistant secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific affairs under Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. “‘Ric, we think you’ve got this nailed,’” Gillespie said Campbell told him, referring in part to the State Department’s analysis of the photo (Campbell did not return a request for comment). “We want to see you get out there and find an airplane this summer.” A month later, in the Benjamin Franklin State Dining Room at the State Department, Gillespie met with Clinton, Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood, and Bob Ballard, best known for finding the Titanic, to announce the trip.
A few days, after that, Gillespie says, he got an email. The sender was Tim Mellon, the guy who would later take Gillespie to court. Mellon wanted to come along on the expedition, while offering $1 million out of his own pocket to help make it happen.
The trip itself, Gillespie says, was a bit of failure, owing to shoddy equipment and the rush to meet the deadline requested by the State Department people. Mellon, Gillespie says, was “fine” on the trip, only later reviewing the 2010 footage and claiming to uncover things that everyone else had missed.
“Tim says, ‘The airplane’s right there.’ I said, ‘Where?’ He said, ‘That’s a part of this and this is a part of this and oh, heck that’s Amelia’s hand. Oh, there’s body parts here.’ I said, ‘Tim, that’s not—that’s coral!’ He said, ‘Nah, nah…’ And this is on an online forum and he’s doing screen captures and circles and arrows and I’m going, ‘Shit,’ and then he decides, oh, there’s her banjo. Banjo? Stamps, toilet paper—it got really crazy. And then he saw Earhart and Noonan’s heads encased in cellophane bags attached to a hose, attached to a nitrogen bottle they used to service the landing gear.
“Mellon,” Gillespie added, “thought they committed suicide and TIGHAR needed to inform the government of Kiribati because it was probably illegal to commit suicide back then.”
Mellon, who Forbessaid in 2014 was worth around $1 billion, is a bit of a recluse, and efforts to reach him for comment on this story were unsuccessful. He emerged at one point during the lawsuit in 2013 to tell the Casper Star-Tribune, in Wyoming, that he was not planning to start a for-profit venture to capitalize on any Earhart findings. But sightings of him online or in the media are pretty scarce. Last year, he released a memoir—apparently self-published—with the title panam.captain: The Intriguing Story of Tim Mellon. “Tim’s story explores the many ways he has been able to turn theoretical opportunity into productive reality,” a description of the book reads. “His memoir puts forth a refreshingly candid look into his family life as well as his business successes.”
Mellon’s lawsuit, filed in June 2013 against Gillespie and TIGHAR, was not one of those successes. The suit made a lot of allegations, but, mainly, it alleged fraud. If Gillespie had a video from 2010 that had already spotted Earhart’s plane, why did he need to spend $1 million of Mellon’s money to go on another expedition? The problem with that, as a judge ruled and an appeals court later upheld, was that Mellon’s interpretation of the video was a matter of opinion, not fact. Even Mellon’s own experts could not definitively say that Earhart’s plane was in the video, a judge noted.
The suit’s dismissal felt like an official debunking of yet another Earhart theory—one of dozens if not hundreds, each with their own proponents. Through sheer persistence, Gillespie, in 2016, has become something like the godfather of them all, if simply by default. His research will always have its critics—rival enthusiasts like Campbell, institutional experts like Cochrane, or those who think Gillespie’s only in it for the money, to satisfy the Indiana Jones fantasies of a few wealthy donors. But he remains possibly the only one who keeps throwing significant money at the mystery, even if he still hasn’t definitively proven anything yet. Gillespie is older, and perhaps a bit wiser now, the heady days of announcing to the world that the mystery is over having had something like a chastening effect.
“You don’t connect all the dots,” he says. “Most of the dots can’t be connected. The lesson is that this is how science works. It’s not: have a great idea, go out and find the evidence, and announce your discovery. It’s collect information, develop a hypothesis, test out the hypothesis, find out that you’re wrong, use that information to construct a new hypothesis, find out that that one’s wrong. It’s failure, after failure, after failure, after success. That’s what it’s like. It’s [been] 28 years and we’re not done yet.”
Sitting on top of a mountain in the northwest corner of Saudi Arabia is a mud and stone structure known as Za'abal Castle (or Zaabal Fort, Zaabal Palace). But it's more than just a fortress, it sit on top of a well system that has run throughout the city of Sakakah for centuries.
The current structure—consisting of a wall surrounded with four watchtowers and a water reservoir—is believed to have been built 200 years ago. However, archeological evidence shows several structures have existed on this site since the first century AD. It's prominence at the highest point in the area gives it a commanding view of the city, but it serves more than one purpose.
The courtyard of the fort is also designed to be a catch basin for water which is then fed into a well system that runs underneath the city. The wells are big enough for people to walk through, though they are closed to the public for safety reasons.
Hunters will go to any length to track down their prey. Τhey will cross ridges and climb mountains, risk life and limb, outwit adversaries... even when the prey in question is a very, very stationary fern.
In the 19th century, Victorians on both sides of the Atlantic came down with a severe case of "fern fever": a craze for all things related to the humble yet ancient plant. It began in 1829, when British surgeon and explorer Nathaniel Bagshaw Ward invented the Wardian case, a glass contraption that kept exotic plants alive in foggy England. His invention allowed botanist George Loddiges to build the world's largest hothouse in East London, which included a fern nursery.
Even though the plant was already associated with fairies, magic and the more primeval aspects of nature, Loddiges knew that he needed to hype ferns even further in order to attract visitors to his hothouse. So he spread the rumor that fern collecting showed intelligence and improved both virility and mental health. Soon, his neighbor, the famed botanist Edward Newman, published A History of British Ferns, a very well-received book which supported Loddiges' claims.
We'll never know if Newman was a true fern enthusiasts or if he was caught up in Loddiges’ rhetoric. In any case, his claims caught on. People started buying and cultivating the rarest specimens they could find, placing them inside increasingly elaborate hothouses. From the start, fern collecting was one of very few hobbies to transcend class barriers: miners and farmers were as likely as aristocrats and scientists to be avid collectors. Indeed, the aristocracy encouraged the poor and the mentally ill to take up the ennobling hobby, and thus elevate themselves.
Newman's book became a bestseller, as did Thomas Moore's The Ferns of Great Britain and Ireland. These were far from the only treatises on the subject: between 240 and 400 books on ferns were published at the time. The art of "nature printing"—a process which uses the actual plant to produce its image—was pioneered by Henry Riley Bradbury so that an actual fern specimen could be used in the book plates; in this way, the illustrations could be as accurate as possible.
Soon, the fascination evolved into a craze. People started printing fern motifs on everything: dresses, tea sets, visiting cards, fans, christening presents, custard cream biscuits, even tombstones. Glass, textiles, pottery, and wood were brimming with fern designs. Iron gates, chandeliers, and fire grates were built to resemble the plant's fronds and leaves. Live ferns hang over dining tables and even inside theaters. Wardian cases filled with ferns were found in every house that could afford them; gardens and orangeries were replaced with ferneries. In 1869, ferns took over the orchestra box in the London Prince of Wales theater, forcing musicians to perform among plants, decorative rocks, and water jets.
The press of the era waxed lyrical about the orchestra box redesign: "The space formally occupied by the band is now converted into a grotto and fernery, intended, with fountains and jets of water, to cool the atmosphere between the acts, and by an ingenious looking glass arrangement to exhibit an interminably multiplied reflection of tiny crystal rills, which will leap and sparkle in the light through a multitude of leafy labyrinths constructed out of tangles masses of choice ferns most artistically disposed." We can imagine the musicians themselves were less enthusiastic.
Of course, it would not be the Victorian era if some did not condemn the hobby as frivolous—Charles Kingsley, who coined the very term pteridomania, was among the critics. Yet a great many Londoners of all social ranks joined fern hunting societies en masse and subscribed to periodicals, which they read while drinking tea from cups adorned with fern patterns. They would then visit the great ferneries, such as Devon's Bicton Park—a place filled with gothic grottos, the better to evoke the fern's primordial mysteries. (It is, after all, a species that has existed since the age of the dinosaurs.)
Their devotion was such that researcher Peter D. A. Boyd likened the fern craze to an actual cult. Perhaps it was a bit of a paradox for the famously uptight Victorians to drown themselves in a plant long connected to female sexuality—but then, this was a quite paradoxical era.
Since the fern was not easy to cultivate, even with Wardian cases at hand, prices soon skyrocketed. After all, there were only 40 types of ferns in the English countryside, and collectors needed more. A non-British specimen could cost up to the Victorian equivalent of 1,000 pounds. Professional fern hunters wrote accounts of scouring the West Indies, Panama and Honduras for a never-seen-before fern. If you could not afford to sponsor a scientific expedition to South America or Asia, there was always the notorious underworld to turn to: crimewaves of fern-stealing plagued the countryside for decades.
But nothing compared with the ultimate thrill: hunting down the wild fern yourself. Ferns extended an open invitation to adventure. According to Boyd, they grew mostly in the "wilder, wetter, western and northern parts of Britain," which were just now becoming accessible through better roads and railroads. Since the plant had not been studied and catalogued extensively before, amateur botanists and scientists armed with field guides jumped at the chance to locate a new species for the first time.
At the height of fern fever, even the truly discerning Victorian hostesses abandoned tea parties in favor of organized fern-hunting. Soon, they were organizing daylong woodland expeditions, complete with picnic baskets and competitions for who would find the rarest specimen. Botany was, after all, one of the few avenues open to women who wanted to experience adventure for themselves; it was popular and widespread enough to be deemed an acceptable outdoors activity for the ladies. Indeed, women could even engage into fern hunting unchaperoned, since it was considered an entirely wholesome, healthy, and moral activity.
Novelist and historian Charles Kingsley praised the trend, which he named “pteridomania,” as a much healthier preoccupation for young women than “novels and gossip.” After all, he said, it was nicer to come home to specimens of ferns than to endless needlework covering everything in one's house. Even Charles Dickens turned to ferns to cure his daughter of her perceived apathy, by suggesting she care for a fernery.
Because fern-hunting was fashionable among both sexes and the trips would sometimes end up as all-nighters, romance was known to thrive among amateur botanists. Some of the fern-born romances were even built to last. When California botanists John Gill Lemmon and Sara Plummer were married, they chose to go on a grand plant safari in the Catalina mountains for their honeymoon "instead of the usual stupid and expensive visit to a watering place.” After all, they had already endured a lot in pursuit of their shared passion: in order to get some of the specimens they wanted, they had ended up hiding in makeshift tunnels while Apache war tribes roamed the California hills to weed out white invaders.
The honeymoon, though, topped that experience. The couple ended up wrangling rattlesnakes, chasms, rockslides, fields of cacti, endless heat and cold. They crossed deserts and stayed in the camps horse-thieves had abandoned. They also ran out of supplies, since a trip meant to last for two weeks took them longer than a month. In the end, though, they reached the breathtaking top—a valley they deemed a botanist's paradise.
Plummer delivered an acclaimed lecture on their adventure and findings, titled “The Ferns of the Pacific Slope.” Arizona’s Mount Lemmon was eventually named after her, the first white woman to reach its top. It remains one of the few mountains named after a woman—not a small feat, considering the couple's initial findings were touted as the work of "John Gill Lemmon & Wife."
The Lemmons were not the only Americans to embrace pteridomania. While the craze was subtler there than in Britain, historian Sarah Wittingham has uncovered enough evidence to prove that fern fever gripped the U.S. as well—with, perhaps, a more lasting legacy. The American fern society after all, remains one of the largest in the world.
In the end, the fern craze only declined with the death of Queen Victoria. Up until WWI, people were still going fern hunting, and the great outdoor ferneries were not abandoned until 1918.
Widespread pteridomania meant that some fern varieties such as the Killarney fern were nearly wiped out. But new ones were also created, since plants from all over the world were jammed together in Wardian cases, resulting in interesting cross-breeds. Eventually, ferns were succeeded by orchids as the obsession du jour—but somehow, the beautiful flower never became as influential as the humble fern.
The mysterious bell tower of Laoag City continues to capture the curiosities of people visiting Ilocos Norte, a northern province of the Philippines. Its tale traces a long story of occupation, struggle, and survival—much like the tale of the country's rise and wane under Imperial Spain.
The coastal Ilocos Region of northwestern Philippines was home the prehistoric native Negritos, and served as a trading port for the nearby Malaysian and Indonesian tribal peoples. Being over a thousand kilometers from the Visayan Islands, the first point of entry for the Spaniards in 1521, this northern region was a rather peculiar place for Spain to establish a stronghold.
Yet after 333 years of Spanish rule over the archipelago, the cultural and religious traditions of Spain are still practiced in the region and many other parts of the Philippines today. Along with these intangible transformations are the indestructible structures that withstood the test of time. Structures like the famed Sinking Bell Tower, the tallest historic building in Laoag City, the capital of Northern Ilocos.
One of the first impressions a visitor may notice is the tower's distance from the city's main cathedral, St. William's. Bell towers are commonly built "attached" to cathedrals or a few meters away, but for reasons unknown, St. William's bell tower was built about 80 meters from its doors.
The bell tower was presumably built after the 1707 earthquake. It withstood several minor earthquakes since completion, hence earning membership to the "Earthquake Baroque" styles architecture scholars label, along with several churched across the Philippines and Guatemala. It was locally constructed by Ilocano artisans who used bricks joined by molasses and leaves from a local plant named sablot. With a foundation of 90 meters and a height of 45 meters, it was a solid structure that towered over Ilocanos for centuries.
Maybe not for too long.
It is believed that the tower is sinking at a rate of an inch every year. There aren't any conclusive scientific explanations to this, but one accepted theory is that because the tower was built on sandy land and considering its heavy and massive structure, this causes the whole tower to slowly bury itself into the ground.
Stories from the past tell of people mounted on horses being able to pass through the tower's gates. However, if one visits the bell tower today, they would realize they would have to almost crawl through its gates to enter the bell tower. (Unfortunately, the city council strictly prohibits unauthorized entry into its prized history.)
Today, the bell tower also sinks in a figurative way. The booming city of Laoag continues to undergo tremendous structural changes. The cathedral itself was recently repainted beige and yellow (much to the locals' dismay), but the old, gray sinking bell tower still stands, tarnished only by the passing of time.
At the tail end of World War II, a flying boat deployed by the Royal Canadian Air Force crashed deep in the coastal rainforest.
Shortly after taking off from Tofino, the Canso 11007 experienced port engine failure and descended at 300 meters per minute into the side of a hill. It carried 12 passengers—all of whom survived—despite crash-landing with 1,000 pounds of explosives onboard. The date was February 10, 1945.
Housed in what is now the Pacific Rim National Park, the Canso Bomber still sits exactly where it crashed all those years ago. This formally registered archaeological site has otherwise been abandoned by Parks Canada due to the dangers of romping down a highway, hiking through muddy bogs, and the potential for getting lost along the way.
Those willing to brave the trail can discover the wreck for themselves at the termination of a slightly treacherous and absolutely stunning hour-long jaunt. The site itself is a free-for-all: take photographs, climb aboard, or have a picnic. Anything one might risk doing atop a remote, secluded heap of torn metal edges is fair game.
To reach the site of the crash, park at Radar Hill and walk to the 15th telephone pole headed away from Tofino. The trailhead is slyly marked by a Sharpie doodle of an airplane. At about 10 minutes in, you'll come across an abandoned building that's also well worth exploring. The rest of the hike is filled with exotic flora, fauna, and tons of mud. Look out for the pink flags, they're there to guide you.
In the 15th and 16th centuries, the mysterious lands of the western hemisphere were a misty haze of tales and stories. After Christopher Columbus set foot in the New World, curious Europeans ate up fantastic sagas about sea monsters, exotic wildlife, and foreign civilizations. Teasing out fact from folklore created an ever-growing obstacle for depicting what the Americas truly looked like.
In 1562, Spanish chartmaker Diego Gutiérrez and Dutch engraver Hieronymous Cock made such an attempt. They visualized the New World in a massive six-paneled engraved map—the largest engraved map of America of its time. Published in Antwerp, Americae sive quarte orbis partis nova et exactissima, Latin for The Americas, or A New and Precise Description of the Fourth Part of the World, served as artwork, informational chart, and political document.
While the intricately engraved map depicts accurate geographical features in many cases (the east coast of the Americas, and the west coasts of Europe and Africa), it is also riddled with propaganda and folklore. Many of the legends and rumors about the New World circulating at that time can be found in the map, too: mermaids, hungry sea serpents, cannibals, a massive erupting volcano in Mexico, and a land of giants.
“I think the Europeans were much more interested in seeing another world [different from their own],” says Aquiles Alencar Brayner, the British Library’s curator of Latin American collections, in a video.
As a respected mapmaker for King Phillip II and Spain’s official trade agency, Casa de Contratación, Gutiérrez was exposed to adventurers’ stories and the riches imported from South America. In depicting the Americas, the Seville-based mapmaker dots the map with many of the popular names and labels that were circulated by European explorers.
Since most people in 16th-century Europe couldn’t read, maps were not only a navigational tool, but a popular medium to tell stories about specific places and civilizations, Alencar Brayner explains.
Gutiérrez drew an assortment of wildlife that had been observed by explorers, including monkeys, parrots, an elephant and a lion. But strangely, an Indian rhinoceros is found poised in the African plains.
Explorers had seen documented accounts of rhinos in Africa, however the illustration in the map is actually a copy of Albrecht Durer’s 1515 depiction of a rhinoceros native to India.
Like many other 15th and 16th-century maps, the treacherous oceans are terrorized by an assortment of terrifying sea monsters, reflecting the fear of the unknown and uncharted waters. In the Atlantic Ocean west of Ireland a massive clawed creature lurks in the waves.
A flying fish can be spotted just below a ship battle in the lower right panel, while a strange-looking ape or monkey seems to be gnawing on its prey just west of the Canary Islands.
The west coast of South America appears particularly dangerous and mysterious. There is a menacing whale ramming into a ship, a dragon serpent, and a group of mermaids holding what looks like a UFO-shaped disk near today’s Patagonia—a legendary land rumored to be the home of giants.
Latin America was home at that time to highly resourceful indigenous peoples, says Alencar Brayner. The Aztecs and the Mayans knew how to work with metals, cultivate land and farm, and preserve artifacts. But the map doesn’t depict these people. Instead, Brazilians are drawn as barbaric cannibals in the midst of butchering and roasting humans.
In southern South America, Gutiérrez shows two members of the Tehuelche tribe as large giants looking down at an explorer in “Tierra de Patagones,” or the land of giants.
The region, which now constitutes parts of modern Argentina and Chile, was described by Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan after encountering the native Tehuelche tribe in 1520. According to his accounts, the Tehuelches were said to have been anywhere from six to six-and-a-half feet tall, and “appeared gigantic to the relatively short-statured Spaniards,” wrote Irene Butler in Langley Advance. Magellan said that his men only reached up to the giants’ waists.
To prove that he had found giants in the New World, Magellan captured two of the Tehuelches and tried to bring them back to Spain. However, they didn’t survive the trip, and Magellan was only left with his and his shipmates’ tales of the land of giants. It was given the name Patagonia, which derives from “pata,” the Spanish word for foot.
Magellan’s bizarre encounter with giants was later disproven by Sir Francis Drake when he explored Patagonia. He wrote in 1628: “They are nothing so monstrous and giant-like as they were represented, there being some English men as tall as the highest we could see.”
While there is obvious fictitious material in the map, Gutiérrez and Cock also name settlements, rivers, mountains, and capes that exist today. They show rough etchings of the Amazon River, Lake Titicaca, Mexico City, and rivers in South America and Florida. There are many correct coastal features of South, Central, North, and Caribbean America, writes John Hébert in the journal The Hispanic Outlook in Higher Education.
The map also contains one of the earliest references to the name California—“C. California” denoted in tiny print on the very left side at the southern tip of today’s Baja California.
While the map achieves the general outlines of what we know America to look like, the map was not intended to be scientifically or navigationally exact, explains Hébert.
“It was, rather, a ceremonial map, a diplomatic map, as identified by the [Spanish] coats of arms proclaiming possession,” he writes. “Through the map, Spain proclaimed to the nations of Western Europe its American territory, clearly outlining its sphere of control.”
Spain’s power and dominance as a world power is hinted at often in the map. In the upper left corner are the Spanish arms of King Phillip II, who makes an appearance on the map. He is depicted like a majestic god cutting through the waves of the Atlantic Ocean in a chariot behind the Greek god Poseidon.
The panel of script in the lower left tells of the conquests of Alexander the Great, subtly aligning the Spanish Empire with the accomplishments of powerful rulers and conquests of the past.
“It’s interesting to see the relationship between map drawing and power,” says Alencar Brayner. “By the time you can map something, you can point out that it’s belonging to you.”
Even though Gutiérrez and Cock’s map of the Americas is full of visual splendor, a lot can be read between the lines. There were still more exciting wonders waiting to be discovered in the New World.
Map Monday highlights interesting and unusual cartographic pursuits from around the world and through time. Read more Map Monday posts.
British ex-pats in this area of Spain sometimes call these weapons the “Guns of Mazarone,” not only failing to use the official name but also using some poetic license to mispronounce the name of the nearby town, Mazarrón to make a rhyme with “Navarone.” The comparison is not without a little justification.
The gun battery was built to prevent enemy ships entering the bay to attack the important port and military arsenal at Cartagena. You really seem to be very high above the sea at Castillitos, though the actual altitude is only about 800 feet.
The Bateria de Castillitos military buildings are extensive and were built in an ornate, crenelated style reminiscent of a Disney set. You can look inside a many of them including both the gun control bunkers and many of the crenelated towers. The highlights of the visit, however, are the massive 381mm guns with the 17m long barrels each mounted in an enormous turret.
These guns were only ever fired once in action. This was during the Spanish Civil War by the Republican Forces against Franco’s Nationalist fleet in April 1937 (Cartagena was a strongly republican stronghold). After being demonstrated once it is unsurprising that these guns, that could fire a one-ton projectile over 35 miles, were not called upon to be used again.
These, and several other, gun batteries overlooking the bay (the Bateria del Jorel,with its slightly smaller guns, is also worth a visit and has to be reached on foot further along the headland) were only taken out of service in 1994 but, given the advancement in naval offensive armaments since WW2, they would probably been little more than symbolic for many years. They were manufactured by the Vickers company in the UK in 1927 and 1928. Apparently these massive gun barrels were towed up the steep winding road by steam traction engines. After driving up there in a modern car the mind boggles at the prospect. Even the prospect of transporting numerous one ton shells up there is amazing.
After taking a good look at the guns and the military buildings it will then become clear that even without these features many people would be prepared to drive the long and winding (and obviously easily defended) route along that narrow road just to see the views (parking is reasonably plentiful and turning round is not a problem). Looking roughly west you stare out over shimmering waters of the Bay of Mazarrón in the opposite direction to look over Cartagena's huge bay. On a sunny day there can be no better coastal views in Spain.
You would think that every single bit of archaeological evidence for ancient life in Greece would have been uncovered by now. But there are still discoveries to be made. A team of archaeologists from the University of Gothenburg in Sweden and the University of Bournemouth in England took a deeper look at a site that had been dismissed as unimportant and found the ruins of an ancient city dating back 2,500 years, reports the Local.
The city was located on a hillside near Vlochós, five hours north of Athens. Part of the ruins there had been previously known, but since this area of Greece was thought to be a backwater in ancient times, this place was thought to be a small settlement of little interest.
Since they started exploring the city, the archaeologists have found the city’s walls, gates, and towers, along with pottery and coins, dating as far back as 500 B.C. The team is using ground-penetrating radar to map the city and avoid disturbing the site through excavation. It’s “quite a large city,” says Rönnlund, and could reveal more about ancient life in this overlooked part of Greece—at least about life up until about 300 B.C., when the city looks to have been abandoned.
A version of this post originally appeared on Tedium, a twice-weekly newsletter that hunts for the end of the long tail.
Let’s say you had a terrible idea. It’s not an uncommon thing; we all have them daily.
And, indeed, if you look around, they're a dime-a-dozen, from this novelty bath mat that has what look like bloody footprints on it to many people who have tried to market and sell waterspecificallyfordogs.
But of all of the bad ideas in the world, consider what might be the worst idea of them all: A video game concept called Action 52.
The nice thing about video games is that, no matter how good or bad they are, there’s always a cult audience ready to tell you every possible detail about that game.
The unlicensed Nintendo Entertainment System and Sega Genesis title, is a perfect example of a bad idea in action. The brainchild of a guy named Vince Perri, the game made a bold promise: You could get 52 original games in a single cartridge, ensuring that you’d never again have to spend $50 on a single game.
Perri is said to have had the idea after witnessing his 9-year-old son play a pirated multi-cart from Taiwan, a device that had numerous titles installed.
“I happened to see my son playing an illegal product made in Taiwan that had 40 games on it. The whole neighborhood went crazy over it,” Perri said, according to a Miami Herald article from 1993, dutifully reproduced by CheetahmenGames.com. “I figured I’d do it legally. It’s obvious when you see something like that, you know there’s something there.”
There was one obvious problem with this line of logic: he didn’t have 52 games to sell. So he hired a couple of developers to make them for him. They didn’t have much in the way of time or money, and while it’s entirely possible they had talent, the lack of time or money ensured the talent would be hard to find.
Perri made the ultimate mistake that one could make when creating an original product—he mistook quantity for quality. But Perri was able to get a variety of investors to buy into his idea, ensuring that the idea had enough funding to go to market (at a price of $199, or as they liked to put it, $4 per game), but he skimped out on the only thing gamers really care about—the actual games.
“Action 52 is just plain ugly, with Cheetahmen and Billy Bob being the only two games out of 52 to contain adequate artwork and visuals,” Hardcore Gaming 101 wrote of the final result in a review. “Some games are little more than a mess of pixels, but for most of them, they look like something you’d find in the margins of an eight year old’s math notebook. There’s also practically nothing in the way of animation, and backgrounds are extremely repetitive.”
A developer who worked on the project, going by the anonymous name of “Action 52 Developer #4,” explained that they were basically up against the wall trying to build numerous video games in a minimal amount of time.
“That’s right, 4 guys, 3 months, 52 games, no pressure. And, no money,” the developer wrote. “That’s until I talked the guys into letting me ask Vince for some kind of advance. I don’t recall the exact number, maybe $1,500. And that’s all I ever got paid for those long hours spent on this project.”
The most prominent game on the multi-pack was Cheetahmen, which Perri hoped to franchise and turn into a series of hit toys.
There are all sorts of stories about the games, Perri, and Action Enterprises flying around. Among them: that the developers of the game ripped off the code of a pirate cart and recoded it for their own needs; that Perri had $20 million at his disposal, but spent less than $100,000 on the game itself; that more than 1,500 copies of a Cheetahmen sequel were sold at a Florida warehouse for a dollar each in 1996; and, most embarrassingly, the vaporware system that the company announced at the Consumer Electronics Show in 1994.
That system was supposed to be able to play NES, Sega Genesis and Super NES games, and included both a built-in LCD screen and a built-in CD-ROM. It was the most obvious piece of vaporware ever created. The company, of course, disappeared without a trace soon after CES.
But a funny thing happened on the way to obscurity for Action Enterprises: A YouTube celebrity named the Angry Video Game Nerd (birth name James Rolfe) took on Action 52 in a two-part episode. The first episode focused on the first 51 games on the cartridge (all of them were awful), while the second gave lots of hate and mockery to Cheetahmen.
Sure, it’s still awful, but people have sort of embraced the awfulness of both the concept and the the absurd backstory of its creation. In 2012, Rolfe even showed up in a Kickstarter video for Cheetahmen II, the unreleased sequel to the original game. (That whole situation drove some controversy over whether or not the Kickstarter’s creator, Greg Pabich, was running a scam—but in the end, the results ended up being legit.)
Perhaps the most notable part of the Action 52 saga is the remake project that came about in 2010, when game developers pledged to remake each of the 52 games on the infamous cartridge, with the goal of making the games good (or at the very least, playable). So far, 23 such remakes have been completed.
The thing to remember about terrible product ideas is that there was likely a point at each of these products' creations where the idea seemed like a good one.
For example, a device that creates any scent you can think of is an innovative idea, if not a particularly useful one. The problem there was a lack of market research.
Action 52, for its part, was clearly a failure in execution, and if it had 52 good games, maybe we’d be hailing it rather than mocking it.
But that's not what Perri made. Maybe he aimed too high, charged too much, or rushed his developers. But the result is this: Given the choice of drinking dog water or playing Action 52, most people would choose the dog water.
Or, at least, they should.
A version of this post originally appeared on Tedium, a twice-weekly newsletter that hunts for the end of the long tail.
One day each year, in St. John’s, Newfoundland, the streets are filled with misshapen, masked figures. They are wrapped in quilts and oversized jackets, or bright boots and distinctive dresses, with undergarments worn on the outside. Their faces are obscured behind gruesome disguises, lacy veils, giant horse heads, or beneath ghost-like pillow cases.
These are Newfoundland’s mummers, the latest iteration of a centuries-old tradition that has its roots in Europe but is entirely unique to this Canadian island. More than a thousand people come out to the Mummers Parade each year, to feel what it's like to shed their normal identity for at least a few hours.
"I see people transform when they put on a disguise," says Ryan Davis, director of the Mummers Festival. "A different character might come out of them. I’ve seen people go into almost a state of trance in their dance."
Newfoundland is as a far east as you can go on North America’s Atlantic seaboard—if you start in Maine and head northeast, past New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and Prince Edward Island, eventually you’d reach this vast island. St. John's, the capital, has a similar feel to a historic New England harbor town, where the water's never far away and the row houses are painted bright red, blue, teal, yellow, even purple and salmon pink.
For many long years, Newfoundland was a place mostly isolated from the rest of the world, dotted with fishing communities that were mostly isolated from each other. It's a classic set-up for divergent evolution, where seclusion incubates unique traits. The island’s tradition of mummering was exported from a very specific part of the British Isles and refined into its own particular species, which, threatened by change, almost went extinct—until just a few years ago, when a local organization intervened in its imminent death and resuscitated mummering for the modern world.
The exact origins of the word “mummer” have become obscure, but they likely had to do with masks or the act of disguise. In England, mummers have dressed up and performed Christmastime plays, which often told the story of St. George and the Dragon and featured themes of winter and rebirth, for many centuries. In some places, mummers’ troupes would also go from house to house to raise funds for their celebrations.
Over time, mummering traditions diverged and developed from place to place within the British Isles and spread, with British settlers, across the world. Philadelphia’s Mummers’ Day Parade is derived, in part, from Britain’s mummer plays, in combination with Christmastime rituals that other Europeans brought to the city. But as mummering has been passed down, it’s morphed in each place into an idiosyncratic tradition.
In Newfoundland, mummering has usually meant, in its most basic form, wearing a costume that disguises your identity and going from house to house, visiting your neighbors. It’s a game of sorts: at each stop, the hosts would try and guess the identity of the mummers.
“Your neighbors would know the clothes you owned, the way you talked and walked,” says Dale Jarvis, an Intangible Cultural Heritage Development Officer at the Heritage Foundation of Newfoundland and Labrador, and author of Any Mummers ‘Lowed In?“You couldn’t use your own quilt because people would have seen it out on the line. So you would wear someone else’s clothing, someone else’s boots—boots too big or small.”
Mummers also have to disguise their faces, and they worked with what was available—an old lace curtain or tablecloth, a pillowcase or flower sack with eyes cut out and, perhaps, a face painted on it.
Mummering in Newfoundland is all about reversals—turning the normal world topsy-turvy. Men might dress as women and women as men. Friends dressed in costume became strangers, and the odd creatures that visited in the night were revealed to be close friends.
But it wasn't all innocent fun. Many towns had a hobby horse haunt their streets—a ghastly figure whose costume might be made from actual bones and who’d chase anyone who wasn’t dressed as a mummer. In the 1800s, parties of drunken mummers would walk the streets with sticks, or bladders full of rocks tied on, and they would use the cover of their disguises to beat others up. Sometimes the hobby horse skull would be used as a weapon. In 1860, a fisherman in Bay Roberts was killed with an axe by three masked men.
After that, authorities started cracking down on mummers' activities, requiring mummers to apply for a permit. When most mummers flouted that requirement, the government banned the practice altogether. For decades, up until the 1990s, mummering was illegal in Newfoundland.
The ban didn't kill the tradition, though. In cities, there were no more mummers' parties but out in rural areas where law enforcement was scarce, people would still get rigged up and go from house to house. Only towards the end of the 20th century did mummering really start to disappear, as the fisheries collapsed, the economy changed, and migration meant that more of your neighbors might be actual strangers, and “people were less likely to let masked strangers in,” says Jarvis. (There is, however, a competing theory for the decline of mummering: people started getting carpets in their houses and were not interested in letting drunken masked strangers bring their muddy boots inside.)
In 2009, mummers first began returning in force to Newfoundland. On a December afternoon, hundreds of people converged on a gym in St. John's, ready to march through the streets in their elaborate (and not-so-elaborate) costumes. This parade had been organized by the Heritage Foundation and the local Memorial University’s Folklore Department, in a bid to revive mummering from its senescence. Even that first year, it worked.
"Just the fact that 300 people, dressed in disguise, showed up sober on a drizzly Sunday afternoon for a parade that had never happened before was astounding," wrote Davis, who was the festival's original coordinator.
Now, each year, hundreds of people march in the parade. It starts with the "rig-up," where mummers can pull together a costume from a dozen tables piled high with donated clothing and hobby horse heads. More experienced mummers might give tips on the best costume strategies; people with accordions and musical "ugly sticks" might start an impromptu jam. It captures a bit of the spontaneity of the old tradition, when you might get a call asking "Do you want to go out mummering?" and have an hour to pull a costume together.
Even with more time to plan for the parade, there's a spirit of "ingenuity and creativity," says Davis. He's seen people wearing lamp shades as masks or using broiler pans and beer bottle caps to make instruments. One year someone dragged a Christmas tree through the parade on the ground, trailing a fragrant smell behind them. Another year, a woman dressed as a fish plant worker and wore a cape made of a net and dried fish. "It stank. It was a terrible smell," says Davis. "But it was also funny."
Dressed as mummers, strangers feel an unusual freedom to talk and tease. One year, a man was dressed as a hobby horse, and a woman started petting the horse, petting his mane. The horse started nuzzling back, being soft and cuddly, until all of a sudden, he turned mischievous and started snapping at her with his wooden teeth. She screamed, and slapped the horse in the face.
"You saucy horse!" she told him.
"In your day to day life, everyone is seemingly different. You’re different ages and backgrounds, but on this day everyone is a mummer," says Davis. "That gives you a lot of license to interact with each other. That’s what I love about it."
For a few hours, at least, you can dance and play—and no one will know who you are.
It was only a minor car accident, but with Carl XVI Gustaf, the king of Sweden, at the wheel, it didn’t stay minor for long. In order to mark the spot and grab some regal attention, a 10-foot (3 meter) burnished crown was erected in the middle of the circle, along with a new name: the King’s Carousel.
It was the 25th of August in 2005 when the King was navigating his BMW M3 in the southeastern city of Norrköping. As is sometimes the case with roundabouts, things didn’t go so smoothly. He collided with another car, and although little damage was done, the newspaper Aftonbladet seized on a contest opportunity. They launched a competition to rename the circle.
The winning suggestion was the King's Carousel, a name that harkens back to another royal driving incident with a backstory of its own. In 1946, Gustav V’s chauffeur skidded off the road while driving the king and his hunting companions back to Stockholm. With the image of King Gustav’s shiny Cadillac stuck in a ditch, people started calling the bend in the road the King's Curve, which later became its official name.
Maybe most curious about the Swedish royal fender-benders were the cars themselves. A Cadillac and a BMW? Does Volvo know about this?
On any other day of the year, Paucartambo is a small, tranquil Andean town where a fly doesn’t repose on a windowsill undetected.
But if you venture down there from Cuzco any time between July 15 and 18, you will stumble into a festival marked by an incessant blaze of color and music. The rhythm of folkloric dances floods the crowded streets. Masked colonial characters wear impossibly detailed costumes that often depict hand-embroidered patterns and images of nature and religious figures.
No matter when you visit, however, one thing will be certain: life revolves around those four short July days when the Fiesta de la Virgen del Carmen is celebrated.
The festival of Paucartambo is considered the epitome of religious and cultural syncretism that arose from the colonial period. Its beauty lies in the merging of indigenous and Catholic symbols and traditions to celebrate the blessing of the Virgin through song and dance.
Wearing beautiful, comical, and frightening masks, and adorned with intricate costumes, there are 19 dance groups. Each of them represents or parodies a colonial character. The three groups that take the center stage of the festival are the Qapaq Qoyas, highland merchants come to town to trade; the Qapaq Chunchos, Antisuyo warriors who protect the Virgin; and the Qapaq Negros, the slaves brought to work on the mines who have devoted their life to the Mamacha.
Other highly notable characters are the Saqras, or playful demons, who are there to tempt the Virgin and the audience, and the Maqt’as, who are both beloved and feared. They are responsible for keeping order, and they take to their task with complete lawlessness. Get in their way or the way of dancers and you will be whipped, sprayed with suspicious substances, or attacked with taxidermied animals.
Over the following three days, the dancers participate in a series of symbolic rituals that range from the somber to the artistic to the festive. The dancers jump through fire to cleanse their souls, serenade the Virgin with solemnity, and go to the cemetery to visit and sing to their departed members. They also light fireworks, throw bread and gifts to the audience, and pull pranks, like flailing around balls of fire and spraying beer over whoever is in sight. In its characters and rituals, the festival brings together feelings of both joy and sorrow.
The culminating ritual is the guerilla, a fight between the Qapaq Qoyas (highland merchants) and the Qapaq Chunchos (Antisuyo Warriors). The merchants, who are said to have brought the Virgin to Paucartambo by mistake, try to steal her and bring her back with them to the highlans, while the warriors use their spears to protect their Mamacha. One by one the merchants fall and the demons come with a (literal) cart of fire to take them to the pits of hell.
As a visitor, it is easy, to fall into the rhythm of the town, to become inebriated with the songs that work much faster than the constant supply of free alcohol. But then the festival ends and you get back on a bus to the Inca capital.
For Paucartambinos, the festival is never truly over. Their entire lives, it seems, are lived in preparation of the opportunity to show their devotion to the Mamacha. Valeria Villafuerte Wilson, who has been dancing as a Qoyacha (young maiden) since she was five, enthusiastically claims, “our year is from July to July.”
Her father and her siblings are also dancers, and their life revolve around the festival. She even claims that she specifically looks for jobs that will allow her to participate in it each year. And when a work conflict arises, the priorities are clear. Her dad has more than once found himself declaring that if his job does not give him permission to attend the festival, he will simply quit. This is a sentiment echoed by most dancers who live outside of Paucartambo.
Being a dancer is no small responsibility. To even be accepted into a dance, you have to prove yourself a worthy candidate. Some people spend six or seven years trying to join a dance before they are admitted. This is especially true for women, since there are fewer dances that include them, and only unmarried women are allowed in them. Once you have joined a dance, you make a solemn promise to the Virgin that you will be back the next year to offer your dance to her.
Angela Bravo Chacon, a political scientist whose family lives in Paucartambo and who has attended the festival every single year since she was four months old, explains that many of the dancers have made a personal promise to the Virgin in exchange for a request—a promise that is not taken lightly.
This is the case with Valeria and her family. They started dancing, she says, because her father promised the Virgin that he would dance for her if she helped cure Valeria of heart disease. Breaking such a promise would be inconceivable to them. When they are not dancing, they are practicing. Like all other dancers, they spend the year outside of these four days rehearsing the routines and working on costumes, each of which is designed to be unique and personalized.
While the dancers are central to the festival, they are not the only ones whose lives are defined by it. Those who don’t dance are often as committed as those who do. The members of Angela’s family, for example, are faithful participants, despite not being, as she puts it, “very Catholic.” She explains that while they are not strict followers of the religion, they are fervent followers of the Virgin: “The festival has a lot of popular religiosity. The relationship that people have with Mamacha Carmen is very personal and mystical, and breaks from the structures of the Church.”
It is this fervent devotion to the festival that defines the life of Paucartambo and drives people to offer themselves as priostes and mayordomos, who are in charge of financially and logistically sponsoring the entire festival.
Each dancegroup opens the door of their meeting hall to anyone who wishes to enter. At lunch and dinner time, every single person will be given a plate of food, often prepared by the dancers themselves. After the rituals of the day are over, the doors open again, and participants are welcomed to a party with live music and free-flowing alcohol.
The prioste and the mayordomos are responsible not only for feeding thousands of people, but for the successful completion of the festival. The prioste takes care of the entire festival, paying for the musicians that accompany the Virgin in her processions, and for providing food and drink at the central house, or cargo mayor. They also have to take care of the Virgin for the entire year.
Why would anyone, especially anyone from a small Andean town, offer to pay an exorbitant amount of money so thousands of others could have a good time? Gisela Canepa Koch explains in her investigation, Masks, Transformation, and Identity in the Andes: The Festival of the Virgin of Carmen, Paucartambo-Cuzco, that the prioste’s responsibility is immense, since the Virgin’s blessing for the next year depends on her satisfaction with the festival. By sponsoring the festival, they not only show their devotion to the Virgin, they also consolidate a position of authority by guaranteeing the future of the town.
The prioste and the mayordomos spend their entire year collecting funds and donations from people around town, organizing the festival, and taking care of the Virgin. Like the dancers, their life revolves around and is defined by the four fateful days in the middle of the winter.
A construction site is probably one of the last places you’d think to throw a dance party. But, roll in a disco-ball cement-mixing truck, and a hardhats-only zone turns into party central.
On December 9, French artist Benedetto Bufalino posted a video of his glittering disco-ball cement mixer—a vehicular artistic invention that transforms a dark construction site in Lyon, France into radiant spectacle. With the assistance of light designer Benoit Deseille, Bufalino covered the large revolving drum with individual mirror tiles. At night, massive lights shine on the disco truck and the spinning installation illuminates the whole area as beams dance over buildings, walls, and streets.
This isn’t the first time Bufalino has taken something familiar and transformed it into an extraordinary art piece. He alters the original function of everyday objects, having converted a sedan into a jacuzzi, a police car into a chicken coop, and an apartment into a tennis court, DesignBoom writes.
Bufalino’s disco-ball cement mixer isn’t the only one that has turned heads. Another concrete-mixing disco truck had been spotted driving down roads back in 2010:
In Lyon, France, families, friends, neighbors, and strangers were lured to the disco construction site, creating an improvised dance floor, reports DesignBoom. Locals were mesmerized the moment they saw the disco cement truck driving around the street corner, Bufalino succeeding in creating a rather unconventional dance party.
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.
In the heart of the medieval city of Bruges is a remarkably contemporary innovation: the world's first legal beer pipeline.
Running underneath the city streets, the tube transports 1,000 gallons of beer per hour—the equivalent of 12,000 bottles—from one of the country's oldest still-operational breweries, Halve Maan ("half moon"), to its bottling plant two miles away.
Brouwerij De Halve Maan opened in Bruges in 1856. A century and a half later, in 2016, a crowdsourcing campaign was launched to raise funds for the beer pipeline. The 500+ donors received a priceless thank you gift: free beer for life. Today, visitors can glimpse a section of the pipeline through a transparent manhole cover cut into the cobblestone street.
At least one illegal beer pipeline set the precedent for this legal one in Bruges: In 1930, a 6,000-foot-long hose was discovered under the streets of Yonkers, New York, which is believed to have been a conduit for beer during Prohibition.
