Some people love a movie so much, they re-watch it over and over and over again. Others, decide to live it. Literally.
Such is the case of the Mad Max enthusiasts who gather in the Southern California desert each September to live out their post-apocalyptic dreams. Wasteland, directed by David Freid takes us into the mind of Mike Orr, a.k.a. “Sweet Lips,” a regular at the Wasteland festival. When he’s not modifying cars and driving through the desert, Sweet Lips works at a public aquarium in Las Vegas. His real passion, however, is Wasteland. “I’m married to it!” he exclaims with a laugh.
The festival attracts those who want to try living in a place were rough is the norm and rules are a thing of the past. “It’s the end of the world” Sweet Lips tells us. “You get to do whatever you want to do.” And what Wasteland enthusiasts like to do is build mind-blowing cars and enjoy an entire weekend of living in this fictional world. Because there are no rules, whatever happens here depends on whatever the people want to happen. Usually, there is combat, fire spinning, and burlesque shows.
Like most other festival regulars, Sweet Lips tries to come up with bigger and better car designs each year. On his third year, he took the idea a step further and brought in a refurbished ship— which happened to be the one from the 1995 film Waterworld. The ship, just like Sweet Lips, got to leave behind its watery life and be reborn in the desert.
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.
Watkins Woolen Mill is empty, but by no means abandoned. The former plantation is part of "living history" at this Missouri state park.
Built by Waltus L. Watkins in 1859, and originally known as the Bethany Plantation, it was one of the first planned communities in North America. On the original 1,200-acre site, Watkins built housing for the mill workers he employed. A self-sufficient community, it produced yarn and wool cloth for national distribution. Additionally, the farm raised cattle, horses, mules, pigs, poultry, various crops, and hosted extensive orchards. There was a church and a schoolhouse on the premises to serve the community as well. When its founder died in 1884, production at the mill declined until the turn of the next century.
The original 1850 home of the family stands on the site, along with the Franklin School, the mill and other utilitarian buildings, complete with much of its antique machinery. The property became a Missouri State Park in 1964 and two years later, a National Historic Landmark, and was then named a National Mechanical Engineering Historic Landmark in 1980.
Watkins Woolen Mill State Park & State Historic Site provides a perfect day trip out of Kansas City. A paved bicycle path, camp grounds and picnic areas encircle the 100-acre lake, which is just the right size for a small fishing boat. Exploration of the buildings is a decent hike, and swimming and boating are allowed. There are numerous public programs that seek to keep history alive with yarn-making, blacksmithing, and wood stove cooking workshops, just to name a few.
The very first American exhibit dedicated solely to stained glass opened on Navy Pier in 2000.
Named in honor of prominent Chicago collectors E.B. and Maureen Smith, the first museum housed more than 150 pieces throughout four galleries devoted to Victorian, Prairie, Modern and Contemporary stained glass. Nearly all of these stained glass works were collected from Chicago-area buildings. It contained a variety of themed items, both secular and not, illuminated mostly with artificial light, highlighting the colors and intricate details of each piece.
Rather than placing the museum in a lofty part of town, the stained glass was exhibited on Navy Pier, a popular tourist site. Admission was free, and patrons encouraged get closer to the works and even bring food into the galleries.
The Smith Museum closed in 2014 but people can still see stained glass at Navy Pier. The museum was replaced by the Richard H. Driehaus Gallery of Stained Glass Windows. It is primarily focused on displaying works by Louis Comfort Tiffany of the secular variety, and some from associated businesses between 1890-1930, collected by the Chicago businessman.
After one Long Island woman accidentally tossed out $5,000 in cold, hard cash, a group of heroic sanitation workers went dumpster diving to fish it back out, according to NBC 4 New York.
Bayban Nadalall had put her $5,000 mortgage payment in an envelope to be delivered, but at some point she confused it with a piece of garbage and threw the envelope away. Luckily, when she discovered her error, she was able to contact her son Krishna, who works in sanitation, asking him what she should do. Krishna then sprang into action.
Along with three of his fellow sanitation workers, they traced his mother’s trash to a local transfer station. There they dumped out a huge pile of garbage, and got to digging. Miraculously, they actually found the envelope and were able to return it with only $40 missing, which had fallen out on the ride.
In a video of the scene, shared by NBC, Bayban can be seen counting out her bills on the back of her car, looking stunned. She offered a reward to the men who found the money, but they refused.
In southern China, not far from where the rice paddies fade into the urban sprawl of the Pearl River Delta, there is a place that used to be called the Four Counties. It's farming country still, even in this age when everyone seems to be heading to make their fortunes in the cities. Small villages of low, tile-roofed houses speckle the landscape. People carry bamboo baskets full of root vegetables on their backs. Stray dogs trot purposefully through the village lanes, eyes alert for kitchen scraps. In the summer, the subtropical sun is like a hammer; in the winter, cold rain sweeps the fields.
It was to this place that Imogene Lim came in 2009. She had just a little bit of information to go on. But Lim, a Canadian anthropologist whose fieldwork has taken her to Tanzania to observe tribes of former hunter-gatherers, was on a voyage of discovery. And with the help of local authorities, she soon reached the object of her quest. She returned this year for a visit. In a Guangzhou hotel room this fall, having recently arrived from the Four Counties (now five, after a redrawing of borders), she took out a photocopied booklet. The cover showed a calligraphic title, proclaiming it to be a genealogy, and inside were page after page of branching diagrams. It had been given to her by a cousin in the village.
“This is my father,” she said, pointing to a name deep into the pages. Underneath it, in a language she cannot read or speak, it says, "Went to Canada, communication lost. Number of children: Unknown.”
The United States and Canada are, famously, nations built from immigrants. Successive waves of fortune seekers, refugees, and slaves—from Italy, from West Africa, from Poland, from China, from almost any place where the prospects of life in a foreign country looked better than staying home, or from places they had no choice about leaving—brought the ancestors of almost the entire present population to the continent. As they assimilated into the existing culture, their children and children's children often grew resolutely rooted in the new place, with little connection to the place of their elders' birth. Lim remembers overhearing her parents and their generation of the family talking about her generation. They called them “the empty ones,” she says—the ones who looked Chinese on the outside, but not on the inside. In the case of Chinese immigrants, even if some families wanted to keep up connections, it wasn't easy for most to visit after the revolution in 1949.
These days, however, a sizeable number of people from these immigrant nations are getting on planes to reverse the journey for at least a few days or weeks, taking trips in search of places left behind. They clamber through muddy fields to find churches, take rural buses to remote farming towns, stand outside houses they've never seen before but have sought out with years of painstaking research. In China, as in Ireland, Poland, and many other wellsprings of emigration, businesses have been set up to serve genealogy or diaspora tourists, offering tours and research help as people set out to find ancestral villages. But what does it mean to return to a place you've never been?
The practice of genealogy—tracing one's ancestors—has a long and strange history. These days, it's mostly obscured by the impression that genealogy is the fusty reserve of retirees, sitting before computers and piecing together information about parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, as far back as possible. Plaintive requests for information about long-lost ancestors on genealogy forums make clear one of the many paradoxes of this process. Though an individual may be the key to an important puzzle for someone, they are inconsequential to almost everyone else on the planet.
When genealogists find a connection to a historical figure of some kind, of course, that all changes. Then the family tree is seen from the other way around—as the descendants of someone consequential, we are consequential too, or at least have an interesting piece of trivia for cocktail party conversation. In an essay for Harper's Magazine, Jack Hitt recounts the childhood moment when a relative helped him fill in a diagram with himself at the center and successive generations of ancestors radiating outwards, then shared a revelation. “This line, she said, pointing to one of the ancient British earls we could claim, leads in a direct line all the way to Charlemagne,” he writes. “Mary's tone was solemn, nearly religious: You are the direct descendant of King Charlemagne. The room felt still as the rest of the universe slowly turned on its gyre about me, just as it did on the paper.”
This is how genealogy has usually worked in the past, says Eviatar Zerubavel, a sociologist at Rutgers and author of the book Ancestors and Relatives. “Traditionally, it's been something that was done for people with power,” he says, people who had reasons beyond the strictly intellectual for tracing their roots. Ivan the Terrible of Russia, for instance, had an imperial genealogy that traced his line all the way back to Noah. (Noah, it turns out, crops up regularly in royal genealogies.) Through the centuries, genealogists have sought to link rulers to some distant eminence or to the original inhabitants of their land. “It's establishing legitimacy,” Zerubavel says, “and establishing identity.”
Even without direct proof of a famous forebear, there is a widespread feeling that blood matters—that understanding who your biological relatives are helps you understand yourself. Adoptees who have rich and full lives with their adopted families sometimes still go in search of birth families. People look at photographs of great-grandparents and wonder whether their own laugh or their temper or their love of music might have been passed down from them. The farther back an ancestor is, the more important knowing about them seems to be, Zerubavel writes, and perhaps the more important they are to one's pedigree.
You share about the same amount of DNA with strangers as you do with many of your distant ancestors, however. Each generation, children get half of their genes from each parent, which comes out to a quarter from each grandparent, and so on. You only have to go five generations back before you stop sharing DNA with some of your forebears. Additionally, geneticists have calculated that anyone who was alive several thousand years ago is either the ancestor of everyone now alive, or of no one. It's an odd fact to get one's mind around, but it's real: Even people born only a few hundred or a thousand years back have staggering numbers of descendants. Everyone now alive who has any European ancestry is descended from Charlemagne, in fact. This is another fascinating paradox of genealogy. Far from being a tidy tree, ancestry is a web that spreads wide long before we are able to draw the boundary lines of family and not-family.
But that hasn't really stopped us from thirsting after connecting ourselves biologically to the past. “We reify nature and biology,” observes Zerubavel, “so that blood, the genes, become much more important, much more significant, than other ways of tying people to one another.”
Those other ways of tying people together—the forms of attachment beyond those of blood—include the language of the country where one was raised, and its culture and common history. Scholars who study diaspora tourism have found that some of these tourists can have very strong attachments to these things in their home countries, even as they seek to understand their roots in other countries.
When Imogene Lim speaks, it's with an accent that would make any North American traveler homesick. She is a compact woman with cropped greying hair and the intent eyes of someone who observes for a living. On this day in mid-October, she is wearing Keen hiking sandals, a salmon top, and a sensible skirt, the kind of outfit that would be at home on any university campus in Canada or the United States. She walks with a confident, no-nonsense stride. And she looks slightly outlandish in Guangzhou, a city of 13 million people, formerly known as Canton.
Practically no one else is wearing anything like this. Fashions for someone of her age around here run to flowing linen shifts and ladylike sandals. No one walks quite like her either. And yet, before you hear her talk, or see her walk, or took in her clothes, you could mistake her face for that of someone around here.
Lim's grandparents left this area for Canada in the early 1900s, before returning, for legal reasons, when their children were small. Her Canadian-born mother was stranded in the ancestral village during the Japanese occupation of China, and walked 800 miles to Kunming, where American forces were based, with her sister, to get a job as a secretary. She eventually managed to get back to North America, and Lim's parents married in Vancouver after World War II. Her father, who was from the same part of China, began to work for what became the family business: a restaurant called WK Gardens, a mainstay of the local Chinatown.
Growing up, Lim was a typical Canadian kid, and she didn't think too much about where her grandparents had come from. As a graduate student, she helped excavate and study the rock paintings of the Sandawe in Tanzania. “The Sandawe people know which clan they belong to, as well as their ancestral land,” she says. “When someone sneezes, you are to call out your ancestral land.” But after her parents passed, she realized that time was running out. If she wanted to know about where her own people came from, she needed to act before the last of that generation was gone. And she found herself wanting to see certain places. “My mother almost died in the village,” she says. “I wanted to see that house.”
The 1977 broadcasting of the miniseries Roots is thought to have helped spark such an urge in many Americans. Based on Alex Haley's multi-generational saga of an African-American family, the story follows the one of the first members of the family to arrive on the continent, an enslaved Mandika man, and then successive generations up to the modern descendants who, drawing on oral history, travel to the Gambia to learn about who their ancestor was.
That year both Newsweek and Time ran trend stories about the rapid growth of American genealogy, emphasizing that while the practice had been mainly a reserve of elites in years past—like Cousin Mary, establishing connections to past greatness—it was now something for everyone, whether their ancestors had been nobility or slaves or Italian laborers. “Newsweek also remarked that genealogy had become fully commercialized, with airlines advertising “ancestor hunting” trips and “local entrepreneurs . . . cashing in as well,”” writes Francois Weil in his book Family Trees: A History of Genealogy in North America. Weil notes that in fact there had been growing interest in genealogy for some time, but Roots was a public, decisive moment.
“I remember the whole nation was talking about it. It was riveting,” says Ellen Puff, a teacher and author who lives in St. Paul, Minnesota, and watched the miniseries as a child. When Puff took up genealogy in her mid-30s, tracing her family back to Ireland, she grew interested in not just the parish books and records she needed for her research, but in the landscapes around them. “It started from an analytical, curiosity perspective—where are they from?” she says. “As I got deeper into the research, I don't know if you'd say this is romantic or not, but I wanted to see what they saw. I wanted to see their horizons. And the mountains don't move. The rivers rarely move.” She has made three trips to Ireland since 2007.
Ireland is a particular hotspot for diaspora tourists. More than 34 million Americans list their heritage as Irish or partially Irish in the census, and Ireland's Tourism Board has a marketing plan specifically for such folks. (Nearly 1.4 million North Americans visited the Republic of Ireland in 2016, making up the fastest-growing major segment of foreign tourists.) But China has its own flow, especially to the part of Guangdong Province where Lim's ancestral villages are. This area, as it happens, was the major source of 19th-century Chinese immigrants to North America.
At the end of second Opium War in 1860, one of the Chinese government's concessions to the British was to permit citizens to leave the country to work, although emigration had been happening illegally for some time. In China’s Four Counties, tribal warfare and banditry provided incentives for departure, and thousands of people made their way out through the ports of Macau and Hong Kong, notes Selia Tan, a historian at Wuyi University in the city of Jiangmen. These were the Chinese who dug for gold in California and built railroads in Canada and the U.S. In fact, historian Mae Ngai estimates that 90 percent of the Chinese in California in the 19th century were from this small corner of China.
Then, as now, the Four Counties are agricultural land, anchored with a handful of cities and thousands of villages. But factories making everything from bidets to motorcycle parts have sprung up as well in recent decades. In one town, a long, dusty main street is lined as far the eye can see with stalls selling faucets of every shape and description (in a serendipitous coincidence, the town is called Shuikou, or Water Mouth). Additionally, rising above the traditional village houses today are more than 2,000 baroque watchtowers, many of which were built in the late 19th century and early 20th century with money sent home by those working abroad. A number of these towers, which were often both mansions and fortresses to protect against kidnappings of the wealthy returnees, stand empty.
Because while some Chinese migrants came back for good—in fact, Tan's own great-great-grandfather was a returnee from California, where he'd been a cook in a construction camp—many didn't. When those people's descendants abroad grow interested in genealogy, the Four Counties is where they trace their roots. It can difficult for roots tourists to arrange the visits themselves, though: Many of them do not speak Cantonese, the most widely spoken local language, or Mandarin. And while some of their families might have maintained contact with folks back home before China’s Communist Revolution, the 20th century’s tumultuous events cut off visits and communication.
Tan has performed extensive fieldwork in North America, visiting local Chinese historical societies and associations, and she acts as a point person for those who'd like to visit their ancestral homeland. They may come with the slightest of leads, as when Newfoundlander David Fong arrived with two empty envelopes bearing return addresses in a town in the Four Counties, from the effects of his deceased father. Detective work led him to a tower house where the inhabitants, long-lost cousins, turned out to have photos of him sent by his father when he was a child. Not everyone is so lucky in their search. But the influx since China's opening up in 1978 of visiting emigrants and their descendants has shaped the area.
“Kaiping had one of the earliest 5-star hotels in China in the countryside,” Tan says of a city in Guangdong Province. With families scattered and lost in the upheaval of the preceding years, these visitors needed a place to stay, and they could afford the price tag.
China doesn't collect statistics on diaspora tourists, says Li Tingting, a scholar of tourism management who has studied the phenomenon. But in a study on the Jiangmen Overseas Chinese Affairs Office, which often aids returnees in finding family, she reported that diaspora tourism was a major interest. In most parts of the country, the OCAO doesn't focus particularly on visitors, instead ministering to the more mundane administrative needs of Chinese citizens living abroad or returning home to stay. In the Four Counties, where so many Chinese overseas have roots, it's a different story. The OCAOs there host festivals and events to draw visits from Chinese who live abroad or people with Chinese ancestry.
The area has long benefitted financially from its diaspora: In 2007, an LA Times reporter visited a place called Los Angeles Village, named for the destination of so many of its inhabitants. There, remittances sent home had supported people for decades, but the money was slowing to a trickle, inhabitants said, as the older generation of folks living abroad died, and younger people did not seem so inclined to continue the gifts. Still, diaspora tourists continue to be sources of investments, donations, and valuable relationships for the area.
Those younger generations may have a different perspective on what it means to go to China than their elders. Huihan Lie, born in the Netherlands to Indonesian-Chinese parents, came to China some years ago, and grew curious about his own heritage. After realizing that there were few resources in English for potential seekers, he founded a boutique genealogy research firm called My China Roots. Lie and his staff now scour local records and hunt down villages on behalf of their clients abroad, even taking them on trips if desired.
While genealogy has the reputation in North America of being primarily a retirement hobby—and genealogy tourism to destinations in Europe, perhaps even more so—Lie says that his clients span a wide range of ages, and many are younger. They're often in their 20s or 30s, beginning to process what it means to have Chinese heritage.
“A very important element is searching for a cultural identity, because very often it's been lacking while growing up,” he says. “There's something there...but you don't know how to identify with it, or what role it should play in your life. You only know that it's part of your life.”
This feeling of being between two worlds often persists even after arriving in one's ancestral homeland. When Imogene Lim got to China the first time, she already knew the name of her father's village. With some help from the Overseas Chinese Affairs Office in Kaiping, she managed to find her mother's, by repeating the story of the two Canadian sisters who had left for Kunming. But being in China was a challenging experience. She could not speak to people without an interpreter. She was constantly mistaken for a local, and it was a problem.
In a restaurant in Guangzhou on her trip this October, intrigued by the man scooping rice out of a steamer, she takes a few snapshots. The man begins to shout in Mandarin at her, telling her pictures are forbidden. When told she is Canadian, not Chinese, he falls silent. “It's funny, in Canada it's the same problem,” she says wryly, sitting down at a table.
As a child, she'd worked hard to blend into her neighborhood, and it worked well. With a new wave of Chinese immigrants arriving in recent years in British Columbia, though, she has felt the gaze of other Canadians getting chillier. When people say pointedly, “Where are you from?” she replies, pointedly, “From here.”
Still, when she saw the places her parents' families had been from, something more personal came into focus for her. Her parents were married for decades. But there was always friction between them, Lim says, and they separated when her mother was in her 70s. In the villages, she felt she understood something of that friction. Her mother's village had a market square, and basketball courts. People had cars. It was a more prosperous-looking place. Her father's village was smaller, poorer-looking. Her mother's expectations might have been different from her father’s, she thinks. And she saw the house where her mother almost died. As the story went, during the Japanese occupation, she'd been so sick that she'd been put outside to die. It was after her recovery that she walked to Kunming, in search of a way out—a way back to where she was from, Canada.
Nearly 70 years later, Kunming and Canada don’t feel as far away from each other as they once were. Even the lengthy plane flight—starting at about 15 hours with connections—is a minor inconvenience compared with how difficult the journey used to be, overland and on ship. That means that the children and grandchildren of immigrants, from China or any nation, aren't necessarily as cut off as they once were.
This is something I have experience with. My mother and grandparents are naturalized Americans, and though I'm from California, I spent many childhood vacations away with their garrulous army of French and Swiss relatives. I have in fact been many times to the ancestral village in Switzerland (or at least, as becomes clear the more you think about genealogy, one of the many ancestral villages), where one of my many great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandfathers was born in 1570. While it's a pleasant place to walk, dominated by an enormous castle and surrounded by vineyards that a distant cousin still works, it's not a place I need to seek out. I've known about it my whole life, and my parents now live a short train ride away.
For many children and grandchildren of immigrants around the world, today's immigration—with Skype, with email, with plane tickets—is not necessarily the stark uprooting of earlier generations. One doesn't have to leave and never go back, and if one's descendants do, it may not be in search of lost roots.
Anders Hsi, a native of Albuquerque, New Mexico, didn't grow up speaking Mandarin or Shanghainese, his grandparents' dialect, but his favorite picture book as a child was a 30-volume adaptation of the Chinese novel Journey to the West. In kindergarten, his teacher called home after she found him drawing what she took to be Satanic creatures—his mother had to gently break it to her they were Chinese spirits, like the ones in his books. Some of Hsi’s most vivid childhood memories are of going to China with his paternal grandparents when he was about five years old, and again when he was 10, in the 1990s. He remembers riding in a van with his great-uncles on a road trip in Western China, and seeing the former family homes in the center of Shanghai, long since converted to apartments. For Hsi, his Chinese roots weren't distant, or masked; they were just part of him, something he was proud of.
As it happens, Hsi moved to China eight years ago, and has lived in Guangzhou for the last seven. He has married a Chinese woman and now runs an e-commerce business with a focus on baby and maternity products, among other ventures. But the fact that his grandparents are from China has had little influence on these decisions, he says. Far more influential has been his interest in international business and the Mandarin classes he took in college; learning a language spoken by a billion people seemed like the best route to an interesting, meaningful life.
Nor is the China he lives in anything like the one they left in the 1940s. It's far more affluent, for one thing: “When they were growing up in China they saw tens of thousands of refugees flooding into Shanghai and freezing to death in the streets during the winter,” he says. The China he returned to is a place of booming commerce and new confidence.
Hsi’s father and grandfather know he cares for his heritage, he says, and they're proud of his new life built between the two nations. “Our family has learned to straddle the fault line between the two nations' essence, you particularly, and we feel very happy for you,” his father wrote him in an email. Both see his move as primarily motivated by natural curiosity and professional interests. “My grandpa was a genetic scientist and spent his career researching and developing peanuts,” says Hsi. “He has told me that I represent "hybrid vigor," which he says with his Chinese accent, meaning I can take the best from both the U.S. and China.”
Hsi and his wife have a two-year-old daughter, a strong-willed girl whose first language is Mandarin. How will she feel about the United States? Will the family stay in China while she grows up? Hsi laughs. “Well, we've been talking about building a house in California. Or maybe Southern France.” There’s one thing he knows for sure: She will have connections to many places.
To yearn to seek roots, perhaps you first must lose them. As young children, we have transitional objects, like security blankets, to maintain a connection lost at birth, remarks Zerubavel, the sociologist; as adults, we have genealogies and ancestral villages, to make up for connections lost before birth. With greater connection possible in the lives of immigrants and their children, it’s possible that root-seeking will fade, or turn into something else. For the moment, however, many people are still engaged in rebuilding these ties, in whatever way they can.
The south China sun filters through the banyan leaves as Lim walks back towards her hotel. She's going to be attending an anthropology conference for the next couple of days before heading back to British Columbia. We stop at the intersection in front of the hotel, talking about her plans. She's excited to report the latest family genealogy developments to her sister and niece. She's wondering how she'll manage the next leg of her journey, which will involve taking the train to Hong Kong, where her flight is. Then she says she is looking for one more thing: She wants to buy a pomelo.
These gigantic citrus fruits, as big as a soccer ball and yellow as a harvest moon, are sold on carts and from stalls all over the city. They are one of the quintessential foods of the Mid-Autumn Festival, when people sit outside together and watch the moonrise while snacking on fruit and mooncakes. Schoolchildren even make lanterns from the hollowed-out skins, carved in a jack-o-lantern effect.
In North America pomelos aren't so easy to get. But Lim's parents used to find them for the Christmas holidays. She has vivid memories of eating them as a child, though they were sometimes battered and dry from their long journey. The fruit's sweet pink segments, extracted from thick white pith, taste like home. Even as an adult, she used to go back from visits to her father's weighed down with gifts of fruit.
I give her instructions to a fruit stall on the Pearl River. It's in a narrow maze of alleyways, some twenty or thirty minutes' walk to the north, and I'm not sure whether it will be easy to find. But undaunted, she goes off later that afternoon—one last quest for the road.
What's cooler than living on top of an active underground volcano? Oh, I don't know—maybe drilling into the volcano's core in order to renewably power your town. A team of geologists on Iceland's Reykjanes peninsula is working on just that, digging a thin shaft thousands of meters into the lava fields in the hopes of harvesting volcanic energy.
The team—a group of scientists, industry, and government officials called the Iceland Deep Drilling Project—seeks to get 5,000 meters underground, where it can tap into the peninsula's large reservoirs of superhot steam. Down there, the volcano-heated water can get up to about 932 degrees Fahrenheit.
"Once the drilling is complete it will be, by far, the world's hottest borehole," Digital Journal reports.
When the shaft is done, the steam will use it like a chimney, traveling up to the surface, where it will be transformed into electricity and through geothermal power plants.
Asgeir Margeirsson, CEO of the IDDP, said what we're all thinking. "We have never been this deep before, we have never been into rock this hot before," he told BBC Science on Wednesday. "But we are optimistic." Steamy.
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.
If you raise an arm in the neon-soaked streets of Tokyo, a taxi—or takushi—will begin a series of majestic maneuvers.
The vehicle will exit the steady stream of traffic, and glide towards you. Before the car has stopped, the door will begin to open as if by magic. It almost clips your thigh, but it’s executed with such skill that all you need to do is turn your hips and slide in the pristine backseat of the cab. While you zoom off to your destination, you become part of Tokyo’s opulence—the radiant roof sign and reflective surface of the cab contributing to the illuminated city.
“The driver is a ballerina with a Toyota Crown at his disposal,” says English artist and photographer Alexander James. As a passenger, “you’re sitting so stationary inside it, yet there’s this burst of energy six inches above your head where the top of the taxi is reacting with the world around it.”
Every city has their own cab culture—from London’s black cabs to New York's checkered yellow. In Tokyo, the tall roofline and the large doors of the boxy Toyota Crown dominate Tokyo’s streets. To differentiate themselves from the approximately 50,000 other cabs driving throughout Tokyo, companies adorn their taxis with their own vibrantly lit roof sign. The colorful symbols and shapes—ranging from cute kittens to bright pink cherry blossoms to cartoon owls—help customers navigate the sea of vehicles.
“I think it’s almost like the modern-day version of an illuminated family crest,” says James.
Over the course of 26 years and 12 trips to Japan, James spent his evenings taking photos of the flow of taxis in the neighborhood of Akasaka, one of Tokyo’s central business districts. Lugging his 6x6 Format Hasselblad camera on his collapsible bike, James went on a crusade to capture and preserve the shining roof signs. He pedaled furiously to snap photos of the rarer signs of independent driver-owned taxis, known as kojin taxis, and smaller cab companies that only operated a few cars.
A selection of his photos were published in the 2012 book Tokyo Taxi, however the streets of Tokyo look much different today.
When he started the project, there were approximately 1,024 cab companies, James wrote in his book. Now, James estimates there are only about 70. Increasingly, kojin taxis and family businesses are being absorbed into larger cab corporations, causing the number of diverse taxi signs to slowly disappear from roadways.
“Many of these taxis don’t exist anymore,” James says. “All of these unique signs are now being homogenized.”
Tokyo’s taxi system began in 1912 with just six Ford vehicles. It has since expanded into a large multi-company operation, with approximately 49,000 taxis on the road providing 330 rides per day as of 2014. Majority of the taxis belong to one of the major firms collectively known as Dai Nippon Teikoku or “Empire of Japan”, an entity that has been around since World War II.
In 1986, James was walking through Tokyo at night when caught a glimpse of a taxi sign he had never seen before. It was a white and gold horizontal bar with a little monkey flanking one side. The friendly-looking cartoon had its arms down at its sides, and rather strange looking nipples, James recalls. He discovered that the taxi, under a company named Monkeys, was one of two in all of Tokyo.
“That’s just so sexy,” he says. “That this city of 14 million people has thousands of taxis, and two of them—just two of them—have this remarkably unique sign of a very cheeky-looking monkey.”
James spent from 1986 to 2012 obsessed with finding and shooting all the rare breeds of taxi signs, making a dozen trips and amounting about 19 months total in Tokyo. Some of his favorite signs are the green star of the Edosou Group Taxi Co., the cute little puppy on the Wan Wan taxi, and the bubblegum-pink flower of the Sakura (which translates to "cherry blossom") Taxi Co.
After a night chasing taxis, James would have trekked about 40 to 50 miles on his bike. He always started taking pictures after 2 a.m. Emerging from a two-dollar soba noodle bar, he cycled around the streets of Akasaka snapping photos and conversing with drivers to learn about their lives.
Every taxi driver faces the same kinds of challenges, yet they all have independent experiences, explains James. Drivers, predominantly men, work about 20 hours a day, according to James. Kojin taxi drivers may even clock in more hours, as they tend to work until they meet their target earnings since they don’t have anyone controlling their workload, write Walter Skok and Satoko Kobayashi in the journal Knowledge and Process Management.
On an average day, a Tokyo taxi driver will journey 154 miles and earn ¥43,514, according to 2012 data, reports Japan Times.
Taxi drivers show pride in their work, says James, explaining in his book that the cars are kept immaculate despite some being 20-year-old models. Some drivers wear white gloves and cover the seats in white cloth. It’s also a very social job, many of the cab companies’ make conversation and proper etiquette a service requirement.
One driver had shared a story about carrying a woman who fainted to her room, and letting her pay the fare at her convenience. A driver of a Sakura taxi told James of a time a young woman dressed in couture had forgotten her large weekend bag in the backseat. When he drove back to the hotel he had dropped her off at to return the bag, she opened it and a little dog jumped out onto her shoulder—covered head to toe in diarrhea.
“The poor taxi driver said, ‘Out of courtesy I had to look away.’ There were 10 men just looking the other way trying to be respectful to the young lady,” he says. There were only four Sakura taxis in operation during the time of his project, according to James. As of March 30, Sakura Taxi Co. is now a subsidiary of Nihon Kotsu Co., one of the Dai Nippon Teikoku firms.
James took upwards of 15,000 photos and documented 950 taxis, but his book could only feature a fraction of the dying breed of neon signs. What is still a major feature of the hypnotic lights of Tokyo may soon only exist in James’ photos.
He has visited every continent and lived in 17 countries, but there isn’t quite a cab system like Tokyo’s, he says. Tokyo’s taxis are “hallowed ground,” a kind of sacred space that defends a passenger’s privacy, he says.
“When you come out of a bar at four in the morning, you don’t want an iPhone driving you home,” he says. “You want something you know is dependable. It doesn’t matter how shit your night may be, [in a Tokyo taxi] you are riding with a gentleman.”
View more of James' photos of the luminous taxi signs below.
The year was 1912, and the rampant commercialism of Christmas in America had begun to irritate the working women of New York City.
Americans had been exchanging holiday gifts for centuries, after the ritual became legal in 1680 following a ban by the Pilgrims, who considered it a crass anathema. By the 19th century Christmas gifts were a firmly entrenched tradition. But by 1911, when a few dozen women in New York City formed what would later be called The Society for the Prevention of Useless Giving, it had reached an early fever pitch.
The yearly emphasis on materialism annoyed the so-called Spugs, but there was also a basic, practical complaint: the era's custom of employees giving gifts to bosses and higher-ups in exchange for work favors. Frequently, these gifts didn't run cheap, costing in some cases up to two weeks' worth of wages, a tradition propelled in part by peer pressure that had grown only bigger with each passing year.
And so, with the help of two of New York richest women, the Spugs decided to strike back.
"Are you a giver of Christmas gifts?" The New York Timesreported on November 12, 1912. "If you are, do you give them in the true spirit of generosity or in the hope that you may get presents or favors in return? If that is the way you have been offering holiday remembrances, and if you wish to rebel against this hypocrisy, then you are eligible for membership in the Spug Club."
The society was founded by Eleanor Robson Belmont, an actress whose husband's family is the namesake of the Belmont Stakes, and Anne Morgan, the daughter of J.P. Morgan, one of the richest men who ever lived. The group began in 1911, with a few dozen female members, but exploded over the next year, growing to over 6,000, the New York Times reported then.
This growth was in part an expression of collective frustration, but it was effectively powered by the charisma of Belmont, who, in the 1900s, was one of the most famous stage actresses in America. She retired in 1910 after her marriage to August Belmont II, going on to become one of the "genuine grande dames" of Manhattan society, the Times said in her obituary. And while she would later become known as an early savior of the Metropolitan Opera, one of her first big philanthropic projects was helping out the Spugs.
At one rally in 1912, Belmont addressed a dissenter, a "young woman of about 25 years," who complained that such a club wasn't necessary.
"But, my girl friends," she told the crowd. "Is it not true that these evils do exist and that you must give many useless Christmas gifts simply because it is the custom?
"Yes, it's true," Belmont continued. "Start the Spug Club."
What happened at the Spug meetings? Ice cream was served, for one thing, while women also took in what was then a novel form of entertainment: moving pictures. The rallies were also, at their root, about female solidarity, even if class divisions lingered, giving the occasions an air of maternalistic charity.
"Don't call them 'working girls,'" the philanthropist Gertrude Robinson Smith said at a meeting of over 1,000 Spugs in December 1912. "They are self-respecting, self-supporting women." The Times went on to describe the meeting this way:
"At first it was difficult to single out the working girls. They were all as well dressed as their patronesses. In fact, all sister Spugs, patrons, and patroned looked alike to the reportorial eye. For the benefit of those who still think that the trem [sic] Spugs is the name for some strange new bug, it must be explained that the letters stand for the Society for the Prevention of Useless Giving."
The meetings continued, and by the following year, the Spug boom was in full force.
"BIG SPUG DANCE ON THE PIER," the Timesreported in June 1913. "Miss Morgan Witnesses 8,000 Vacation Girls In an Evening's Pleasure."
The organization initially was just for women, though men were later allowed in, mostly because of Theodore Roosevelt, who, in December 1912, became the first "man Spug," prompting hundreds of others to join to movement to tamp down on Christmas gifts.
"I believe the group can accomplish what the individual cannot—namely, the gradual substitution of the right spirit of Christmas giving, in place of the custom of 'collective' and 'exchange' presents which exists to-day," read the Society membership card Roosevelt signed. "I agree to pay 10c. a year dues and wear during all campaigns the Spug button."
Yet just two years later, the Spugs had scattered. War had erupted in Europe, and the attentions of Spug founders Belmont and Morgan—as well as the rest of the world—had shifted elsewhere. The Spug fad was over, though their point had been made, a message that wouldn't seem out of date today.
The Real Housewives of New Jersey is very often on in my house, blaring from a television or phone or tablet. I hear it more than I see it, and it is a fantastically fun show to listen to, if you have an ear for regional dialects. My god, the vowels these people use! It’s like a chorus of airhorns.
One word that the Housewives use, sometimes to excess, is “friggin',” as in, “These people are friggin’ animals.” With that friggin’ word constantly ricocheting around my apartment, it’s impossible for me not to wonder: where does it come from? And what about all the other soundalike words we use to say “fucking” without actually saying it? What determines whether someone says “friggin',” “frickin',” or “freakin'”?
“Fuck,” or “fucking,” dates back as far as the early 14th century, but it’s not until the late 15th century that historical linguists have lots of examples to toy around with. There is a whole group of words that are etymologically related, throughout all the Germanic languages (English, German, Dutch, Finnish, Swedish, Danish, Icelandic). “They’re all short words beginning with an “F” and ending in some kind of stop consonant, with something in between,” says Jesse Sheidlower, a lexicographer and author of The F-Word, a history of the word “fuck.” These words all meant something like “to strike” or “to thrust,” which led to a sexual meaning.
But though the word is pan-Germanic, English was the real “fuck” pioneer, responsible for the earliest examples of words that are definitely “fuck.” Most of the other Germanic languages now have some kind of variation with its own sexual connotation, but English was first.
The use of the word as an exclamation (as when you stub your toe) or as an intensifier (as in “New Fucking Jersey”) is much newer. “The earliest clear example of ‘fucking’ as an intensifier is from the 1890s,” says Sheidlower. Certainly expletives and profane language are harder to track than most words, given that people are often reluctant to write them down, but Sheidlower was confident that if the word was used in this way earlier than the 19th century, we’d know about it by now.
Here’s where things start to get goofy. A word that is similar to (either in sound or meaning) but is not quite a profanity is called a “minced oath.” We don’t really know how old minced oaths are; examples from centuries past tend to be more like puns or double entendres than what we’d consider now a minced oath. (“Frickin’” is a minced oath, because it has no real meaning of its own but is used because of its sound similarity with “fucking.” A Shakespearean joke where a character says “country,” with extra emphasis on the first syllable, is a pun, sort of.)
According to Google’s Ngram, which tracks the frequencies of printed words over time, the major three minced oaths for “fucking”—”freaking,” “fricking,” and “frigging”—all came about at around the same time, starting in the 1920s with minimal use and then really taking off in the 1950s and 1960s. Nobody seems to know why this happened, except that minced oaths have to be born after a word is firmly entrenched as a profanity. In other words, “fucking” has to be common before anyone would know what you were saying when you say “fricking.”
Was there also something about the culture of the mid-20th century that encouraged the use of these minced oaths? Probably! But any explanation would involve working backwards to come up with a guess; there isn’t any data about that kind of thing.
In any case, by the late 20th century, minced oaths for “fucking” were standard. And weird. The entire idea of a minced oath is bizarre, a pure example of how completely arbitrary language can be.
“You want people to know exactly what you mean, but you don’t want to be on the record having actually said it,” says Benjamin Bergen, the author of What the F: What Swearing Reveals About Our Language, Our Brains, and Ourselves. “We don't think that anyone we're talking to doesn't know the word, we don't think they're going to think we don't know the word when we say something different, but we're all party to this agreement.” “Frickin’” is an unspoken contract we’ve all signed, saying that one word is forbidden, but a similar word can stand in while in polite conversation.
You might notice we haven’t talked much about “friggin’” yet, and that’s because “friggin’” is not quite like the others. From the 15th century until the late 16th century, “frig” was an innocent verb in English, meaning to move rapidly, to rub, or to chafe. It was its own word, entirely unlike “freaking” and “fricking,” which are, essentially, made up words which sound like “fucking.” (Yes, “freak” is its own word, but “freaking,” as a verb or expletive, is entirely unrelated and born much later.)
By the late 16th century, “frig” had taken on a sexual meaning, referring specifically to masturbation, and usually female masturbation. The earliest examples were kind of punny, used by wordy playwrights and writers as a way to talk about sex cleverly. But soon the masturbatory meaning eclipsed the nonsexual meaning. “Frig” was a very common expletive, if a fairly mild one, until around 1850, when it suddenly dropped off in popularity. Until, that is, the word was reborn.
A century later, “frigging” was dug out of the closet, now used as a minced oath for “fucking.” This is, to say the least, not how minced oaths usually work—they’re typically minced oaths, not reconstituted ones. “Frigging,” previously profanity in its own right, lost both its edge and its original meaning and became wholly acceptable as an anodyne substitute for a completely different swear word. “By the mid-20th century it’s become a minced oath, so it’s not considered offensive anymore, really,” says Bergen.
Depending where you live, though, you might never hear “friggin’” from anyone except the Real Housewives. Where do people say “freakin’” compared with “friggin’”?
Jack Grieve, a linguist at Aston University in England, has created a truly magical tool to look at just this kind of thing. His WordMapper collects about a billion tweets geotagged in the U.S. from late 2013 to late 2014, and plots the 10,000 most commonly used words. You can search any word and see its geographic frequency and distribution. For our purposes, we’re using the “hotspot” feature, which adjusts for relative frequency—meaning it controls for the amount of people in each county, so New York City doesn’t just show up as the hotspot for every word.
The data isn’t necessarily foolproof as a way to tell how people speak; after all, it only measures Twitter users, and it’s only looking at how they type. But it’s still a good indicator of where people say certain things, and when it comes to minced oaths, it’s got some pretty weird data.
Let’s first try “fucking,” as a sort of control. What it gives us is basically a population map of the United States: major cities tend to use “fucking” more often, whether they’re New York, Miami, or San Francisco.
We tend to get slightly different results if we leave the final “g” off these words, and not every version shows up in Grieve’s top 10,000 list. There’s an entry for “frickin” but not “fricking,” for example.
“Freaking” and “freakin’” both show up. With the “g,” we get the highest use throughout Texas, and, for some reason, in both major American mountain ranges, the Appalachians (well, the western part of them, anyway) and the Rockies (Utah and Wyoming, especially). “Freakin” is slightly more popular, including those regions but also bleeding into Oklahoma, New Mexico, and Arizona.
“Frickin” is totally different. The map for this word shows the highest frequency in the Upper Midwest, especially Wisconsin, Minnesota, and North Dakota, with significant popularity also southward in Nebraska.
“Friggin” is, again, a different story. (“Frigging,” with the “g,” isn’t popular enough to make the map.) This strangest of minced oaths has the highest frequency of use in Upper New England, specifically in Maine and New Hampshire, with a weird little pocket out in South Dakota and Nebraska.
I also tried some different spellings, just for fun. “Fucken” makes the grade, with very high frequency all around the Pacific Coast, from Washington to Oregon, California, and into New Mexico and Arizona.
“Fricken',” too, shows up on the map, with an expanded map similar to the one for “frickin'.” This time, it hits Michigan, through Wisconsin, Minnesota, and to the Dakotas.
The obvious question, when presented with these clear regional boundaries for our favorite “fucking” substitute, is, well, why? The unfortunate answer is the same one you often get when you ask linguists why people speak the way they do: we have no real idea.
“We do have some good explanations for regional patterns in the vowels and other aspects of sound systems of American English dialects. But when it comes to idiosyncratic, fast-changing lexical items like soda or friggin’, it's hard to track the origins,” says James Stanford, a linguist who studies the dialect of New England at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire. Could it be because Mainers and other New Englanders use a dialect rich in archaic English words, like a variation on “aye” that’s sometimes spelled “ayuh”? Sure, maybe. But also maybe not. It’s not really possible to find out.
Stanford, though he doesn’t know why it’s the case, agrees that “friggin’” is remarkably popular in northern New England. “I'm around Northeast students all the time here, and I think I hear them say friggin’ quite a bit (but the unvarnished f-word is the most popular),” he writes. “But we haven't done a quantitative study.” As usual, we have a much better sense of where, when, and how people speak. As to why Mainers say “friggin’” and Minnesotans say “frickin’,” well, that remains a freakin' mystery.
Across the world, and likely right this moment, humans are knocking on wood. Many are frantically flipping over their slippers, making sure they’re not upside-down. Still others around the globe are shivering at the sight of a black cat crossing their path. Or an owl.
These are all common superstitions, or non-organized folk rituals built on the premise of controlling the outcome of events. Superstitions are spread through word of mouth; we teach them to our friends and our grandchildren. These traditions are often ancient and untraceable, focusing on powerful otherworldly forces that are related to incidental or simple actions any person can do.
Superstitions offer a way for humans to shape our destinies—or try to. Many of us follow rituals to stave off bad luck, attract romance, or keep our own inner worlds intact. Now thanks to this interactive map, we can look at 150 of these mini-beliefs across the planet.
Many of the most prevalent superstitions loosely relate to early versions of the world’s major religions or to ancient pagan beliefs. Still, "Pinning down the origins of superstitions can be baffling," Max Cryer writes in his book Superstitions: And Why We Have Them. "Unlike epigrams, quotations, proverbs and literary allusions, superstitions often grow without visible ancestry."
Countries can share superstitions, too. If you speak at the same time as a friend or say something you don’t want to come true, and then knock on wood? You’re in the good company of millions of people in the United States, Syria, Ireland, Brazil, Switzerland, Germany, Italy, Mexico, and likely a few other locales. In some locations, knocking on wood is believed to prevent the devil from entering the room (stemming from the notion that the devil was unable to touch certain woods, like oak)—which may in turn have evolved from pagan rituals regarding the worship of trees.
Leaving slippers upside down is bad luck in Syria, Egypt, Nepal and Brazil, while breaking mirrors is bad luck in most of the Western world. Keeping disembodied rabbit feet and avoiding black cats—which has been traced back to Egypt in the year 3,000 BC—are both observed practices in countries across every inhabited continent on Earth. If your palms itch in Ghana, the U.S., Brazil, and much of Europe, something money-related is about to happen.
Meanwhile, people in almost every single country in the world are constantly avoiding the “evil eye” (wishes of ill will by one person upon another) by wearing various amulets or ash, crossing their fingers to make a “figas” hand shape, or, as in the Netherlands, painting their farmhouses with a protective black stripe. Across Europe and its former colonies, bad events like deaths or illnesses are said to happen in threes, and horseshoes are believed to bring money and luck. Although each location offers its own variation on popular superstitions, for the most part common beliefs have been left off our map to make room for more distinctive entries.
A note on the unified phenomena of our folk traditions, however: because there is no agreed-upon distinction between religion and superstition, what one person considers a superstition (derogatorily), another sees as a legitimate belief. So this map is offered without judgement, with a focus on rituals we teach each other from one generation to the next, which tend to fall beyond mainstream religion and into the folk-made aspects of belief. Sometimes superstitions are taken seriously; other times they are not. All of them are, for one reason or another, rumored to have real consequences.
As there are thousands of superstitions around the world—the U.S. section of the map could be filled with fisherman's beliefs and sports superstitions alone—consider this a sample. For some, it can serve as a guide. But whatever you do, if you’re traveling in Italy, Germany, parts of the United States or many other areas of the world, don’t toast with a glass of water, which wishes death to your companions, or you’re going to have a lot of figas to do.
Riggs Bank was a Washington institution for over a hundred years. More than 20 U.S. Presidents—from Lincoln to Nixon—banked at Riggs, whose headquarters across the street from the Treasury Department was pictured on the back of the old $10 dollar bill.
In its golden age in the 19th century the bank financed Samuel Morse's development, lent the federal government $16 million for the Mexican-American War, and supplied the funds to expand the capitol building and build the Washington Aqueduct system. Finally in 1865 it lent $7.2 million in gold to Secretary of State Sewell to purchase Alaska from Tsar Alexander II.
But this place at the center of power in Washington eventually led to some ugly business deals, which resulted in Riggs' downfall in 2004.
Today, chances are that if you're a native Washingtonian, you've walked by one of the former Riggs branches and not even known it. The iconic PNC banks in Dupont Circle and in Georgetown both used to be Riggs buildings. You can still faintly make out the outline of "Riggs National Bank" under the Dupont Branch Building's brass lettering.
Trouble started brewing in the 1980s, when the CIA came to Riggs with a covert international affairs project. Working through the Saudi royal family (who banked at Riggs), the CIA provided funds to the Nicaraguan Contra rebels and the anti-Soviet Mujahideen in Afghanistan.
Riggs also had a more sinister relationship with Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet. Senate hearings in 2004 shed light on to the ethically troubling story. Senator Carl Levin found that "In 1994, top Riggs officials traveled to Chile and asked General Pinochet, a notorious military leader accused of involvement with death squads, corruption, arms sales and drug trafficking if he would like to open an account at Riggs Bank here in Washington, DC. Mr. Pinochet said yes."
"The bank opened an account for him personally, helped him establish two offshore shell corporations in the Bahamas called Ashburton and Althorp, and then opened more accounts in the name of those shell corporations both here and in the United Kingdom. General Pinochet eventually deposited between $4 million and $8 million in his Riggs accounts."
Riggs was ultimately hit with $45 million in money laundering fines as a result of the scandal. Business went downhill quickly in the 2000s. The bank's leadership was spending an inordinate amount of time pursuing embassy business that was prestigious, but "break even, or less," according to PNC bank's CFO. (At one point 95% of the foreign embassies in Washington banked with Riggs.)
The embassy business was high risk and had Riggs executives flying to client meetings around the world on an expensive corporate jet. The elegant Riggs buildings also became a liability, further adding to the bank's high overhead. The scandals and debts continued to mount, and in 2004 Riggs was swallowed up by PNC Financial Services Group. The former Riggs Bank headquarters is now a publicly accessible Bank of America.
In the depths of the Museum of the Art Institute of Chicago is a carpeted room with windows into 68 gorgeously decorated rooms—each built to the scale of 1 inch: 1 foot.
The rooms were a project by Narcissa Nidblack Thorne, who married the heir to a department store fortune. As a child, she'd always loved dolls and dollhouses; as an adult who traveled extensively through Europe, she made it a hobby to collect miniature furniture and accessories.
To house her collection, Narcissa drew designs for several rooms to hold her treasures, and commissioned cabinetmakers to construct them. It was 1932, and unemployed craftsmen were plentiful. Over time, though, the project became increasingly ambitious. In 1936 she was asked to create a miniature version of the library at Windsor Castle to mark the (ill-fated) coronation of Edward VIII. Inspired to create more facsimiles of real rooms from some of Europe's most impressive castles, museums, and homes, she hired architects and members of the Needlework Guild of Chicago to get the designs just right, down to the tiny textiles and carpets.
The Thorne Miniature Rooms are beautiful examples of painstaking craftsmanship, and of architecture and interior decoration from specific places and periods: French and English styles from the 1500s through the 1920s; and American style from 1875-1940. They were featured at exhibitions and art museums throughout the U.S. before finally settling at the Museum of the Art Institute of Chicago. (Two more are in the collection of the Indianapolis Children's Museum and the Kaye Miniature Museum in LA.) The collection at MAIC, though, is thought to be the largest collection of miniature rooms in the world.
High on a rocky promontory on the breathtaking coast of the Tyrrhenian Sea—also known as the "Coast of the Gods"—is Santa Maria dell'Isola, a 4th century monastery that's accessible only by climbing up a winding flight of steps carved directly into the cliffside.
People have lived in Tropea for 6,000 years, since Sextus Pompey defeated the emperor Octavius. According to legend, it was founded by Hercules himself.
Santa Maria dell'Isola was built so long ago that even the topography of the land around it has changed. When it was first erected, it was on its own little island. But over the centuries, silt built up and filled in the water between that island and the mainland. The building itself has lived several lives, as well: A simple church in medieval times, it was made over during the Renaissance. In 1905, an earthquake destroyed its facade, and it was rebuilt again.
A holy destination for pilgrims, the church is home to a 12th century Byzantine portrait of the Virgin Mary that, according to locals, protects the area. In 1638, the Virgin from the portrait appeared to the Bishop in Calabria, and warned him of an impending earthquake. On March 27 of that year, he rounded up the residents of Tropea and marched them out of the town. An earthquake struck that very day, but the people stayed safe.
When the U.S. Civil War erupted in 1861, both sides faced a significant absence of a critical resource: well-trained, experienced nurses. At the time, the only "professional" nurses to speak of were nuns from orders who ran hospitals or otherwise provided ministration to the sick and injured. Despite prevalent anti-Catholic bigotry at the time, some 600 nuns answered the call and proved themselves invaluable in caring for the casualties of the bloody struggle.
Completed almost 60 years after the end of the Civil War, the Civil War Nurses Memorial was the brainchild of Ellen Ryan Jolly, president of the women's auxiliary branch of the Ancient Order of Hibernians. The Irish Catholic organization raised $50,000 to construct the monument after Jolly secured approval from Congress on March 29, 1918. Noted Irish artist Jerome Connor was commissioned to create the sculpture. However, construction did not begin until five years later, due to disagreements about the location of the memorial and composition of the artwork. It was finally dedicated on September 20, 1924.
The final product consists of a granite base and slab bearing a bronze bas relief entitled Nuns of the Battlefield. The sculpture depicts twelve nuns in an impressive assortment of habits (including one wearing the cornette of the Daughters of Charity, the headgear said to be the inspiration for the Flying Nun) representing the various orders that provided medical care in the army camps. Angels of peace and patriotism flank the relief, underlining the merciful role the nuns served in the midst of the carnage.
If you visit Tigre Salvaje, right on the border of Costa Rica in Panama, you'll be welcomed into Dave Teichmann's house, where he'll show you his handwritten notes from his decades of turtle conservation research. You have the option to camp or stay in a bedroom attached to his house and will likely run into the enormous troop of capuchin monkeys swinging through the trees.
Dave has no formal training or grant/government support for his endeavors, but spends his time, effort, and money dedicated to the cause. He regularly arranges for educational school trips to visit his preserve, but as he states on his website, anyone is welcome to come. "If you show up," the information page states, "we will find space for you."
Every night he sets out to go on patrol to ensure that poachers are not disturbing turtles nesting on the beach. Dave has constructed his own hatchery after coming across many dead mothers and babies. Located right on the beach, this hatchery safe guards Olive Ridley, Leatherback, Hawksbill, Loggerhead and Green turtle eggs until they're ready to hatch. During a visit, turtles may hatch and scuttle to the shore right in front of your eyes.
A visit to Tigre Salvaje is a truly unique, off-the-beaten-path adventure that gives you a sharper look into turtle conservation efforts in Panama and how one individual can have an incredible impact. Dave's meticulous note-taking is a wonder in and of itself.
Minichelista in Mexico City is likely the most bizarre restaurant you will ever visit, and even one of the best. Created 10 years ago by artists, the space is full of little tiny nooks and crannies where you can eat at a table made from the handlebars of a motorcycle as you sit in a closet with your date.
The restaurant is a large house, and as you walk around the residence and up spiral staircases it feels like the place is your own as food is being cooked all around the house. The staff are super casual, drinking coffee from cups as they wait your table and smoking cigarettes while greeting you at the front door.
Everything is well thought-out at this amazing establishment. Even the french fries that come with your meal will arrive on the plate as a collection of a few thin fries, a few wedges, a couple of happy faces, and some rippled fries: Someone actually takes the time to mix up the fries for the plates. The milkshakes will melt your mind once they hit your tongue. A hot chocolate comes with cayenne to make sure it warms everything up. The quirkiness of this place is surely worth mentioning to anyone visiting the city.
Just across the river from Louisville is one of the oldest candy stores in the region. The Schimpff family has been making candy in the area since at least the 1850s, and it remains a family tradition to this day. It's been named one of the state's hidden treasures and is considered by locals to be a crucial stop in any tour of the Louisville area.
The current location in downtown Jeffersonville wasn't established until 1891 by Gus Schimpff. The business was passed on from generation to generation and has stayed in continuous operation ever since, even surviving the Great 1937 Flood.
Celebrating their 110th anniversary in 2001, the family expanded into the building next door and opened a museum filled with historical candy memorabilia, where guests can see homemade candy being created on authentic century-old equipment.
The establishment became renowned in the region for both the food as well as the history and antique flair of the building. It is best known for three specialties: cinnamon red hots, hard candy fish, and a kind of caramel covered marshmallow treat called a Modjeska (named after a Polish actress who visited Louisville in the late 19th century).
Toronto's Ireland Park commemorates the tens of thousands who fled Ireland during the Great Famine to North America in hopes for a new life and land between 1845-1852.
The park was designed by Irish-Canadian architect Jonathan Kearns and feature five bronze sculptures created by Irish sculptor Rowan Gillespie, who, 10 years prior, created the famous Famine Memorial in Dublin located on the bank of the river Liffey. The park also features a large limestone wall imported from Kilkenny, Ireland with the names of those who died in 1847.
Deep within a mine in Canada, there is a pool of water bubbling out of the ground. It’s close to 2 miles below the surface of the earth and, according to the scientists who discovered it, it’s been there for 2 billion years, making it the oldest pool of water in the world.
Previously that record was held by a pool further up in the mine, about 1.5 miles down, which was discovered in 2013 and given the age of 1.5 billion years.
The scientists date the water by analysing the gases trapped inside. As the CBC explains, gases like helium and xenon accumulate in the water while it’s stuck in rock fractures. Measuring those concentrations can tell the researchers how old the water is.
What’s unique about this water is that it’s been conserved for all that time. Much of the water on this planet has an even older origin: half of the water on Earth is actually melted interstellar ice that predates the sun.
As the BBC reports, the most fascinating aspect of these billion-year-old pools of water is the possibility that they could reveal more about life on Earth billions of years ago. The scientists have detected signs that single-celled organisms once lived in this water, which is now about eight times saltier than seawater.
Before it was occupied by Georgetown University office space, this iconic four-story brick building housed the Capital Traction Company's off duty streetcars. The Georgetown car barn is one of many extant remains of the formerly robust network of streetcar infrastructure that carried Washingtonians around the city for a hundred years.
Washington's first streetcar line opened one year into the Civil War, in 1862, running a horse-drawn car from the White House to the Capitol. The number of streetcar companies and lines proliferated in the following decades as Washington experienced a population boom.
In 1888, Frank Sprague invented the first electric streetcar, and about a decade later Congress started requiring D.C. streetcar companies to ditch their horses and make the switch. The greatest impact of the electric switch (other than the reduction of horse poop) was that it opened up the hills above Washington for suburban development. Communities like Bethesda, Silver Spring and Tacoma Park offered the perks of country living while providing transportation to urban jobs.
By 1895 the “Great Streetcar Consolidation” brought many of the streetcar companies under the roof of the Capital Traction Company, an early transportation conglomerate. That same year they went on to complete the car barn in Georgetown as an end of the line facility on M Street.
Streetcars fell out of favor nationwide in the 1950s, and the last one ran in Washington in 1962.
The streetcars themselves are now long gone (H Street not withstanding), but if you know where to look there are some scattered remnants across the city.
The ornate wrought iron benches on Capitol Hill were originally a streetcar stop (they were also designed by famed landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted!). The Dupont Underground was also originally built so that streetcar traffic could bypass the congested traffic in the circle above. There's also the obvious old streetcar tracks poking through the cobblestones and asphalt along several stretches in Georgetown. Last but not least, PEPCO, the region's utility provider, was originally formed as the electric division of a streetcar company.
