A video posted by Olga Skorokhod (@olgaladyart) on
Nature offers wondrous textures and formations, from stacked frozen methane bubbles, rough contours of lava stones, to the deep caverns of lakes. Ukrainian paper artist Olga Skorokhod transforms physical landscapes into airy, abstract topographical artwork comprised of carved layers of paper.
In the short video posted on her Instagram account, the Oregon-based artist shows the final steps of piecing together intricately cut shapes of white paper into an unconventional three-dimensional map of Lake Baikal in Russia. Skorokhod's body of work includes layered-paper pieces of the vast forests of Oregon, Lake Tahoe, Crater Lake, and Lake Powell.
A photo posted by Olga Skorokhod (@olgaladyart) on
She began creating works out of sculpted paper three years ago, spending 12 to 15 hours a day carving out sheets. A large piece can take anywhere from two to three weeks, and requires tons of sheets of 150-pound white paper—the material chosen for its lustrous, smooth finish. Skorokhod's main tool for cutting is a fine surgical blade, allowing her to make precise slices and small shapes.
A photo posted by Olga Skorokhod (@olgaladyart) on
Sometimes she adds a splash of color, but prefers white paper for its softness and purity. In the piece depicting Lake Baikal, the clean shade of ivory against the bright blue film resembling the water makes a striking contrast. Skorokhod adds double-sided sticky foam between layers to create a greater illusion of depth.
"The distinguishing feature is the paper edge that's hand-cut at an angle with surgical blade, as this creates smoother transitions from light to shadow," Skorokhod writes.
A photo posted by Olga Skorokhod (@olgaladyart) on
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.
We all know and dread the feeling. The sharp pang felt in the middle of the night that tells you your body needs relief right now. You lie in bed, trying to make sense of the world in that stage between sleep and consciousness. You consider risking a UTI just to avoid getting up and tumbling towards the bathroom, often missing the light, cursing the glass of water that quenched your thirst before you fell asleep.
Perhaps the solution to this horrid scenario lies in the wisdom (or lack of technology) of the past. That’s right, we’re talking about the tool that allowed you to have a bathroom right in your bedroom—sometimes, right under your bed: the chamber pot.
Throughout history and around the world, chamber pots have been used as an elegant portable toilet. They were a convenient alternative to outhouses, especially in the middle of the winter, when going out in the cold to heed the call of nature was even more unappealing than a midnight restroom excursion.
Today, versions of chamber pots continue to be used, mostly in rural areas of countries like China and North Korea, where indoor plumbing is expensive and still uncommon. In the western world, they are used to potty train children— though we keep them outside the bedroom and inside the bathroom.
But why would anyone who doesn't need to want a chamber pot? Maybe you’re a New Yorker whose cheap rent comes with the tradeoff of not having a bathroom. Maybe you’re looking for a very cool and unique last-minute Christmas present for that friend who is hard to impress. Maybe you want to start trying new things in the new year, and sometimes old is the best way to do new. Whatever it is, we have come to help you meet a need you never knew you had, and have compiled a list of chamber pots you could own in just a few clicks. From the intricate and elegant to the purely whimsical, you’ll have a hard time resisting purchasing them right on the spot.
This beautiful chamber pot is perfect for the person who truly wants to treat themselves to a luxurious experience. Well, as luxurious as you could get in the late 19th century. Painted in royal blue, it has enameled gold flowers, and gold painted handle and ridges. The intricate details are hand painted and will make you feel like French royalty.
So you want to try using a chamber pot but you’re still not ready to tell your friends and family? Buy this coy chamber pot that can pass as a regular Victorian chair. Your loved ones will think you developed an interest in collecting vintage furniture and might even admire your beautiful acquisition. Just make sure you don’t let them sit on it or your cover might be blown.
This gorgeous chamber pot is perfect for the wallet-conscious person who wants to join in the fun without breaking the bank. You may not be able to hide the smells of a chamber pot, but the floral print will give you the illusion that you can, and the mind is a powerful tool.
As far as beautiful and unique chamber pots go, it is hard to match this one. Its vibrant colors give life to images of everyday family life as well as birds, flowers, and butterflies. Made in the early 19th century, it almost makes peeing in a pot sound pleasant.
Chamber pots are not just for the rich and fancy. If you want to teach your kids the way of the pot while instilling in them values and humility, this one is for you. Made in the USSR, it is simple, pragmatic, and inexpensive. We can’t guarantee your kids will love it, but that's not really the point, is it?
Gold and blue flowers decorate this mint pot. It is quite pleasing to the eye and very large. Not having any chamber pot experience myself (though this list might soon change my mind) I cannot say for sure, but it doesn’t seem like the shape is optimal for taking care of private needs. It sure is pretty though.
This chamber pot cares nothing for aesthetics and is merely practical. It also carries a lot of history. It was used in the trains of the Central Pacific Rail Road and the accompanying instructions warned passengers not to empty it out of the train windows. It may not be pretty but it brought relief to countless travelers in its time, and that is definitely worth something.
It’s the chamber pot that doubles as a high chair and auxiliary table. You can sit your child on it without having to crouch down, or use it as a normal chair with a table next to it. The footrest is also adjustable so you can personalize it to your children's size. Being an 18th-century English nanny has never been easier.
With its pleasing design and soft colors, this pot is certainly tempting. But while it includes handles for convenience, it doesn’t have a lid. If you would rather not have body fluids exposed, there are plenty of other ways you can use it.
Sometimes, using the bathroom can be a stressful affair. The scenic green imagery of this chamber pot will help take your mind off your worries and concentrate on verdant landscapes and mountains so you can feel at ease.
Why should you get to have all the fun? Make your Medieval doll collection feel special with its very own miniature gothic commode. It is handmade and includes a bucket and a basket filled with cotton. Your miniature castle isn’t complete without this.
If you’re one to go big or go home, don’t just limit yourself to a chamber pot. Go all out with the entire turn-of-the-century hygiene set and feel as if you’ve traveled back in time. The set includes a wash bowl, a pitcher, a chamber pot, a soap dish, a bowl, and a mug. The beautiful patterns depict scenes of nature that will help you forget about the commodities of modern technology.
Finally, if you're thinking of giving in to the urge to add a chamber pot to your room, but hesitating because discretion is of the utmost importance to you, we suggest looking at this French Empire po table, or this Italian commode. There are ever more stylish and subtle ways to hide your new pot.
On New Year's Day, if you pass by the parking lot of Chicago's Adler Planetarium around 11 o’clock in the morning, you’ll come across a surprising collection of cars and drivers readying themselves to run a very unusual rally. In years past, the gathered machines have included rare sports cars, a 1961 Cadillac hearse, and a school bus—everything from Ferraris and Maseratis to absolutely average cars.
At noon, every car registered for the rally will be given a sheet with anywhere from 30 to 100 places to try to visit over the next three hours. This is the Heroes' Happy Holiday Hangover Hassle.
Started in 1955 by a group of sports cars enthusiasts, the Holiday Hangover Hassle has been run every year since; the guardians of this tradition believe it is the second oldest continuously run car rally in the United States. But it is no ordinary race—in 1961 a magazine for car rally enthusiasts described it as “an event we can’t really call a rally.”
Part scavenger hunt, part reunion, it is a madcap love letter to Chicago and the pleasures of spending a few hours exploring the city. What makes the rally great, says Paul Brian, 65, who ran his first Holiday Hangover Hassle at 15, is “the creativity of each rallymaster in finding some element of the city to focus on,” whether that’s used car lots, terracotta architecture, extinct breweries or funeral homes.
Also, almost no one is trying to come in first: the winner is responsible for producing the event the next year. “No one ever wants to win this event,” says Brian. “The sweet spot is to come in second place.”
The origins of the Heroes' Happy Holiday Hangover Hassle are somewhat shrouded. It’s clear that it was created by the members of the cheekily named Outer Drive Hero Drivers Club, sports car owners living in Chicago’s north suburbs, whose route into the city was down Lake Shore Drive, on the edge of Lake Michigan. It is also clear the event started in 1955.
Beyond that, the details are indefinite. Even in 1961, as the Rallye Route reported, “We did quite a bit of research on this and were unable to verify any of the facts, including the names of founders. Actually, we got as many versions as people we talked to.”
Brian’s version of the story is that, in an early iteration, club members would race through a very dangerous Lake Shore Drive S-curve to see who could make it the fastest—until someone thought that perhaps a different (and safer) format would be advisable. In the 1970s, Brian and another rally stalwart, Rich Carroll, won the event and, when it was their turn to design the rally, they decided to turn it into a scavenger hunt.
“We spent a day or two doing everything we could to find odd, interesting, arcane, sometimes byzantine pieces of information about the city, and everybody had to bring them back,” says Brian.
For four decades or so, that’s more or less how the rally has worked. As a general rule, the task of participants has been to drive around the city, on no predetermined route, to visit certain places and answer questions about them. There’s usually a theme, like railroads or Chicago public library facilities. “Honorary Mention” was designed around honorary names given to streets and sections of the city by aldermen; 2003’s terracotta buildings theme is a fan favorite.
Answering the questions means getting points. Usually these are very specific and narrow questions that can only be answered if you’ve physically visited the place; sometimes they are not. (For example: “Make up a question. Answer it.”)
Some years there has been a system of envelopes that need to be opened at particular points or in a particular order. Sometimes there is also a list of objects that participants can collect for additional points. In 1979, when the theme was “Is the Pope Polish?,” that list included a Polish/English dictionary, a Polish postage stamp, a picture of John Paul I, a business card from any Polish church official, and one can of Polish beer. In 1985, the list included a White Castle hamburger, a bus transfer, and a floppy disk.
There is a fair bit of wiggle room in answering the questions—or winning at all. “Everyday cheating is not going to help you at all,” says Carroll. “Creative cheating is encouraged.”
One year a group opened the wrong envelope, which automatically ended their race—so they bought a new one and pretended nothing had gone wrong. They ended up in the top 10. One year Carroll and Brian asked people to bring in a “Buffalo Box cover,” part of a piece of infrastructure used to control the water supply in a building.
They got a manhole cover and a fake mustache that was said to have belonged to a buffalo. Both received points. (However, last year’s instructions noted: “A buffalo box cover is NOT a manhole cover. Please do not remove any manhole covers during the event.”)
One year, Brian won without showing up—he had been living in Dallas and couldn’t make it, so he was declared the winner and told he had to design the course the next year.
There is also a special reward for finishing in the top three—a trophy featuring a monkey wearing a helmet and goggles, and trying to fix a broken sports car.
One of the greatest pleasure of the Holiday Hangover Hassle, though, is seeing the same friends year after year. It’s become a generational event, with the kids of long-time participants starting their own winning teams.
The barrier to entry is low—just show up with a car at the Adler Planetarium parking lot on New Year’s Day. “Everyone should come,” says Brian. “Anybody who comes is going to be warmly welcomed as a fellow traveler in a very strange world.”
In 1449 rebels in Toledo, Spain, published an edict you’ve probably never heard of, but whose effects still resonate today. It was the first set of discriminatory laws based on race.
You probably know about the widespread mistreatment of Jews in Spain, even if your first thought when someone says “Spanish Inquisition” is a Monty Python sketch. But Spanish and Portuguese antisemitism isn’t just a historical artifact. According to historians like David Brion Davis, the Spanish categorization and treatment of Jews “provided the final seedbed for Christian Negrophobic racism,” and “gave rise to a more general concern over ‘purity of blood’—limpieza de sangre in Spanish—and thus to an early conception of biological race.”
The discrimination against Spanish Jews peaked decades earlier, in 1391, when a fanatical priest incited anti-Jewish mobs with the slogan “convert or die.” A third to a half of the Spanish Jews—the largest community in Europe at the time—were converted to Christianity, the greatest mass conversion in modern Jewish history.
Some “conversos” became enormously successful, a success that fostered widespread resentment against these “New Christians”. During a period of political instability in 15th century Castile, conversos, as supporters of the kings, became scapegoats for weak rulers. In some cities physical battles broke out between “Old Christians” and “New Christians” (converted Jews).
The most important of these conflicts took place in Toledo, and began as a tax revolt. On January 25, 1449, Alvaro de Luna, a favorite of King Juan II, demanded from Toledo a loan of one million maravedis. The townspeople actively resisted payment, and a mob quickly obtained control of the city gates.
A local official, Pero Sarmiento, joined the rebellion. On taking control of the city, he announced he was compelled to act by “the need to remove Alvaro de Luna from the Court.”
Their relative wealth made conversos a tempting target. Sarmiento and his followers used the revolt as a pretext to confiscate their targets’ belongings. Sarmiento ordered converso leaders arrested and tortured until they admitted to conspiring with de Luna against the city government.
Up to this point, all accusations had been political. But in order to justify the looting, Sarmiento’s followers floated rumors that conversos were still secretly practicing the Jewish faith and were working against the Church. Sarmiento formed an inquisition to punish conversos.
On June 5, 1449, Sarmiento issued the Sentencia-Estatuto, the first set of racial exclusion laws in modern history. It barred conversos, regardless of whether they were sincere Christians, from holding private or public office or receiving land from the church benefices unless they could prove four generations of Christian affiliation.
The Sentencia introduced race into Spain. Conversos, it claimed, came from the “perverse lineage of the Jews,” and thus brought the “same harms, evils and wars which the Jews, the enemies of our Holy Catholic faith, have always brought.”
The anti-Semitism expert Leon Poliakov deemed this “the first example in history of legalized racism.” It also constituted the first anti-Semitic restrictions—discrimination based on a racial, rather than a religious, definition of Judaism.
This Toledo innovation went viral. Other localities soon followed Toledo’s example. For example, Córdoba banned conversos from office and exiled most conversos. Guipúzcoa prohibited conversos from living or marrying there.
Schools also embraced restrictions on converso students, starting with the Colegio de Santa Cruz de Valladolid in 1488. By 1537, conversos were barred from the Universities of Salamanca, Valladolid, Seville and Toledo. By the early sixteenth century, cathedral chapters began to bar conversos from church offices.
The crime of which those of Jewish lineage were guilty was deicide. The alleged Jewish role in killing Christ was a kind of original sin, inherited by Jews and passed down in the blood. Because the act superseded the rite of baptism, baptism could not purge conversos of this crime.
The phrase limpieza,“purity of blood,” came into common use in the sixteenth century. The phrase was understood literally, not metaphorically: Medical belief held that blood was the principal of four humors in the body, because it circulated the other humors. Blood therefore played an essential role in establishing a person’s character.
The most important conflict over limpieza discrimination came in the mid-16th century. The Toledo archbishop, Juan Martínez Silíceo, limpieza’s strongest proponent, recommended imposing purity-of-blood restrictions in his archdiocese.
The most prominent cleric to resist this was Ignacio de Loyola, founder of the Jesuit order. Loyola befriended Spanish conversos at the University of Paris, who eventually became some of the founding members of the Jesuits. Diego Lainez, a converso, succeeded Loyola as the order’s superior general.
The prominence of conversos within the Jesuits meant it was inevitable that the order would come into conflict with Archbishop Silíceo. Silíceo banned members of the order from acting as priests without first being personally examined by him. Jesuits could only win Silíceo’s favor by adopting limpieza, and Loyola refused to comply. This significantly impeded the growth of the order in Spain.
But the resonances of Spanish limpieza restrictions went far beyond their effect on the Jesuit order. Iberian initiatives—African race slavery, the discovery of America, the development of plantation agriculture—made limpieza a force in the development of anti-black racism.
Beginning in the 1440s, Spain and Portugal entered the African slave trade, formerly dominated by Islamic countries. The discovery of America and the development of plantation agriculture considerably expanded African slavery. Between 1500 and 1580 Spain shipped approximately 74,000 African people to America; this number increased to approximately 714,000 between 1580 and 1640.
Along with slavery, Spain exported limpieza. In 1552, the Spanish Crown decreed that emigrants to America must furnish proof of limpieza. The Spanish deployed limpieza throughout Spanish America and the Portuguese adopted it in Brazil. In its new environment, limpieza began to mutate, beginning to refer to an absence of black blood as well as an absence of Jewish blood.
In both cases, the idea was that “impure” blood could taint a person’s character. In 1604, historian Fray Prudencio de Sandoval compared the impure natures of blacks and Jews: “Who can deny that in descendants of Jews there persists and endures the evil inclination of their ancient ingratitude and lack of understanding, just as in the Negroes [there persists] the inseparability of their blackness. For if the latter should unite themselves a thousand times with white women, the children are born with the dark color of the father. Similarly, it is not enough for the Jew to be three parts aristocrat or Old Christian, for one Jewish ancestor alone defiles and corrupts him.”
The main target of limpieza in the Americas was black blood. Limpieza was used to discriminate against Africans both to justify race slavery and to enforce the distinctions that a race slave system required.
The operation of limpieza in the Americas mimicked its viral spread in Spain. Limpieza excluded persons with black blood from civil and religious offices and various fields of commercial endeavor. It was not until 1707 that persons of African descent could take up Holy Orders. Royal decrees barred university admissions to people with African blood.
From Spanish America limpieza expanded to influence racial attitudes in the British colonies. By the time slaves were introduced in Virginia, the Spanish had over a century of experience with slavery. The American colonies looked to Latin America to help them develop this peculiar institution. As the historian Alden Vaughn notes: “Because the Latin American model of lifetime, inheritable servitude was apparent to everyone—Spanish and Portuguese colonists held a quarter of a million black slaves by 1617—Virginians had no need to invent a new status.”
The vocabulary the English colonies adopted for race had roots in the Spanish colonies. “Negro” came into English from Spanish in the mid-16th century and “mulatto” a half century later. “Sambo”—in Spanish a mix of “black” and “Indian”—became a derogatory word for blacks in English.
Even the word “race” came from Spain, where it was used to refer to people of Jewish descent. As the social anthropologist Audrey Smedley explains in Race in America: “In fact, ‘race’ did not appear in the English language … with reference to human groups until the seventeenth century. . . It is quite likely that the English adopted the term ‘race’ from the Spanish.”
While the Spanish used “blood” in the racial context by the sixteenth century, the English examples of this period pertain to family relationships of aristocratic descent. It was not until the eighteenth century that the English colonies used “blood” in a racial context.
Memoirs of a Huguenot Family, the account of an American settler in Virginia printed in 1757, contains a condemnation of miscegenation that incorporates purity-of-blood concerns. The author writes of whites who mixed with blacks, complaining of “this abominable practice which has polluted the blood of many among [them],” adding, “We . . . should not have smutted our blood.”
Thomas Jefferson expressed similar concerns about miscegenation. He said that Blacks should “be removed beyond the reach of mixture” so that they could not stain “the blood of [their] master.”
It was now the 18th century. Limpieza—born three centuries earlier in Toledo, Spain—was now embedded in the consciousness of the new American nation.
Before the National Portrait Gallery requisitioned the space in 1962, this beautiful room was the Old Patent Office model hall. Inventors used to have to submit working models along with their patent applications. As technology progressed during the Industrial Revolution this “Temple of Invention” was stuffed to the gills with intricate miniature machines.
In its heyday, the Patent Office was one of the busiest office buildings in Washington. Every day, hundreds of inventors and attorneys from across the country came to search the patent records. The model hall predated the Smithsonian Institution by a decade and was a must-visit attraction for tourists.
The building was commissioned after Congress passed the landmark Patent Act of 1836 to collect “a general repository of all the inventions and improvements in machinery and manufacture, of which our country can claim the honor.” In its first year the Patent Office received 765 patent applications, but within 50 years the number of annual applications had grown to 41,048. The rate continued to increase year after year after that.
From 1836 to 1880 miniature models were a required addendum for all patent applications (The Washington Post explained this as a way to “get rid of the perpetual motion cranks”). The Patent Office collection brought in hundreds of thousands of these miniature wonders, creating a one of a kind industrial museum. Visitors could examine Eli Whitney’s mechanical cotton gin, Samuel Morse’s telegraph, George Westinghouse’s air brake, Joseph Glidden’s barbed wire, as well as 1,093 Thomas Edison inventions.
The patent trade supported a cottage industry of model shops in Washington. Several of the shops are visible in the Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps of the neighborhood around the Patent Office.
During the Civil War the Patent Office and its model hall were enlisted in the war effort for use as barracks and hospital space. Soldiers slept in three-level bunks among the rows of glass cases.
Walt Whitman frequented the Patent Office during his service as a nurse. He described the “immense apartments” as “fill’d with high and ponderous glass cases, crowded with models in miniature of every kind of utensil, machine or invention, it ever enter’d into the mind of man to conceive.”
The decade after the Civil War was the high water mark for the Patent Office’s model collection. In 1877 a fire destroyed the third floor of the building and 87,000 models were lost. Finding space for all the models had always been a problem—the Washington Star wrote that “the government resorted to such storage places as the commerce building, the crypt at the Capital, and a rented garage at Seventh and F Street NW.” After the 1877 fire the government gave up and rescinded the model requirement from the patent application process.
In 1926 the Patent Office moved to get rid of the collection entirely. According to the Washington Star, “The Smithsonian looked them over and took about 15,000. The rest were sold at auction over six years beginning in 1926.” Many of the models were bought up by Sir Henry Wellcome, but his dream of a patent model museum was tabled by the 1929 stock market crash.
The Old Patent Office Building itself was almost torn down in 1953. Congressman Charles Oakman thought that the property was the ideal location for a new parking lot that could “solve Washington’s downtown parking problem.” Thankfully it was saved from the wrecking ball by an early historical preservation campaign, and repurposed as the National Portrait Gallery. Today the old model hall houses sculptures and paintings.
Most of the Christmas traditions we take for granted today are Victorian inventions: Christmas trees, Christmas stockings and Christmas carols didn’t exist much before the 1840s. Yet while these are somewhat diverting, the most exciting and outrageous Victorian traditions have been almost totally forgotten.
Indeed, in the early years of Queen Victoria’s rule, Christmas rivaled Spring Break for sheer bawdiness and self-destruction. Nowhere is this more evident than in the bonkers Victorian parlor game of Snapdragon.
Traditionally played on Christmas Eve, players of Snapdragon must find themselves a broad, shallow bowl, and then prepare to risk their health. Into this bowl should be poured two dozen raisins. If raisins are hard to come by, almonds, grapes or plums will suffice. You should then pour a bottle of brandy into the bowl so that the raisins bob up and down like drowning flies. Place the bowl on a sturdy table, turn the lights down low, and then, with appropriate panache, ignite the brandy.
To play Snapdragon, arrange your family and friends around the blazing bowl so that their faces are lit in a demonic fashion and then, one by one, take turns plunging your hands into the flames in order to try and grab a raisin. If you can accomplish this, promptly extinguish the flaming raisin by popping it into your mouth and eating it.
As one contemporary commenter wrote, the game “provided a considerable amount of laughter and merriment at the expense of the unsuccessful competitors." So popular was it that it was even celebrated in poetry:
“With his blue and lapping tongue Many of you will be stung, Snip! Snap! Dragon! For he snaps at all that comes Snatching at his feast of plums Snip ! Snap! Dragon!”
For the steadfast Victorian, nothing announced it was Christmas morning better than blistered hands, burned lips and a scorched palate. Snapdragon was so much fun that it even had a non-seasonal variant—Flapdragon—in which a lighted candle was placed in a mug of ale. Participants sought to drink from the mug without setting fire to their beards, mustaches or hair. Fire was to the Victorian era as Netflix is to our milksop age.
Snapdragon was not the only deranged Christmas pursuit on offer, for the Victorians were relentless innovators in painful drunken partying. Take Blind Man’s Buff, which is still played today albeit in a watered-down form. This variant of tag sees one blindfolded player attempting to tag the others.
But the Victorians played an altogether tougher version in which, according to a contemporary chronicler, “it is lawful to set anything in the way for Folks to tumble over, whether it be to break Arms, Legs or Heads, ‘tis no matter.” So painful and numerous were the injuries caused by playing Buff that it was rumored that the game had been invented by “Country Bone Setters” as a way of ensuring business.
Questions and Commands, a variant of today’s Truth or Dare, was also played on Christmas Eve. Failure to follow a command or answer a question led to either a monetary fine, or more often, getting your face completely blackened with soot from the fire. There was of course much drinking of strong ale flavored with nutmeg and sugar but this was often combined with the traditional and nameless Yuletide challenge of trying to spin around fifty times in a minute, which caused most participants to “reel home, or lie down in the Barn.”
If anyone still had energy the evening could end with a game of Hoop and Hide, a diversion similar to Hide and Seek, although it came with the caveat that if anyone was caught hiding in or near a bed “the dispute ends in Kissing.”
As festive games have softened so has Christmas literature. Rather than saccharine tales of Saint Nicholas creeping through the house, Christmas Eve used to be a time of ghost stories and tales of supernatural mischief. Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol remains the sole surviving example of what was once a burgeoning tradition of “winter tales” dating back to Elizabethan times (Shakespeare alluded to this tradition in his play, A Winter’s Tale, which is suffused with magic, madness and strange transformations.)
Throughout the 1970s the BBC steadfastly kept up the practice by broadcasting a ghost story in the late hours of Christmas Eve, and in the 2000s even had Christopher Lee sitting in front of a roaring fire reading the bone-chilling stories of M.R. James. Alas this practice has since come to an end, drowned beneath cloying animations and schmaltzy family entertainments.
So yes, the Christmas we celebrate today is Victorian in nature, but it is a far cry from the flaming, bruising, drunken, puking, terrifying festival of yore.
In 1851, Edward Stanford published an unusual map of London. It looks south across the capital, and depicts a landscape undulating with details: streets, canals, parks and of course, the twisting Thames. But it’s the perspective that is most intriguing—it is etched as though viewing the city from a hot air balloon over Hampstead.
The timing of the map’s publication coincided with the first day of the Great Exhibition of 1851. Amid the wonders of industry on display at the Crystal Palace, the map clearly still resonated with Victorian audiences: reissues continued for over twenty years. Today, an original is held at the University of Oxford’s Bodleian Map Room.
The map collection at the Bodleian Library is one of the world’s largest, containing over a million maps from the early medieval ages to the 21st century. A new book, Treasures from the Map Room: A Journey Through the Bodleian Collections, chronicles the history and stories behind 75 of the Library’s most impressive maps. Highlights include an 11th century world map from the Book of Curiosities, and Britain’s first road map from 1675. Atlas Obscura has images of these, and more.
It’s not exactly Atlantis, but archaeologists have discovered what might be the oldest example of a garden ever found in the Pacific Northwest.
According to Science, archaeologists discovered the garden just east of Vancouver, hidden beneath the waters of a natural wetland, at a site labelled, DhRp-52. The researchers found 40 square meters of tightly interlinked stones that created a sort of unbroken pavement. Also found at the site were various crude digging tools and around 4,000 wapato tubers, an edible plant not unlike a potato which is thought to have been the main crop of the garden.
The garden is thought to have been created by the Katzie, a First Nations people in British Columbia, and it's been dated to around 3,800 years old, making it possibly the oldest surviving garden structure in the region. The people that built the garden likely lived on a nearby dry spot of land while using the shallow wetland to grow their swamp potatoes, according to Science.
The rice-paddy-like site is also an important window into exactly how agriculture developed in the area, where the actual structure still exists rather than simply having documentary evidence. Still, the tubers don’t look very appetizing.
Beneath an unmarked cellar door in a 15th century church lies a dark, secret, osteological oddity.
Leuk is a small town in Switzerland's Rhone Valley mostly known for the thermal spa to the north, but the town itself has been around a very, very long time. The first church was built around the 6th century out of a preexisting Roman building. This was torn down and reconstructed several times before the gothic St. Stephan's Church was erected in 1494.
In 1981 the church undertook a restoration project. The restorers pulled up the floorboards with the intention of building a basement community center, but soon found that would be impossible. A hidden cellar had been housing a 9-foot-tall, 65-foot-long wall of skulls for centuries.
During archaeological excavation the very next year, 26 statues were discovered hidden beneath three feet of bones. They were dated between the 13th and the 16th centuries, around the time the current church building was constructed. The artworks found in the charnel house included a remarkable Pièta and a well-preserved Danse Macabre fresco, still on view in the charnel house. Its memento mori inscription reads: "What you are, we once were. What we are, you will become."
No one is quite sure why the charnel house is there, or why it was kept secret. Some historians speculate that these many bones didn't end up beneath the church via war, disease, famine or disaster, but rather there simply wasn't enough room in the cemetery for them. Some of the skulls have what appear to be bullet wounds, which may mean that they were victims of a 1798 battle, exhumed from the cemetery after it became overfull.
Whatever the case, the discovery enlivened the city. Several medieval buildings in Leuk were in ruins and slated for demolition. When the secret ossuary beneath St. Stephan's was discovered, renewed interest in the old buildings increased. They have now been restored, and serve as another draw to the historic little town.
The George Washington Memorial Parkway was one of the first high-speed roadways designed specifically for automobiles in the United States. It’s significant both as a beautiful piece of landscape architecture and a transportation engineering breakthrough: Its designers pioneered many of the transit principles that we take for granted, like highway medians, overpasses, exit ramps, safety flared intersections, and cloverleaf interchanges.
The initial stretch of the GW Parkway was built during the early 1930s as a New Deal-era make-work project (that’s the same year the first sections of the German Autobahn opened, as it were). Automobile ownership in the U.S. had skyrocketed over the preceding two decades, and drivers were clamoring for better roads. The largest streets at this point were urban avenues, and they were designed with horses and pedestrians in mind.
Outside the cities road conditions were almost medieval; if you wanted to cross the country in the 1930’s you did it on dirt roads and cow trails. The Washington Post noted in 1930 that the Parkway’s planned route “will pass through a rugged countryside, most of which remains in a state of virgin beauty."
The GW Parkway was innovative in its status as a long distance, high speed, and automobile-only roadway. It was designed by the Bureau of Public Roads, a part of the Department of Agriculture (DOT was not established until 1966). The department built large architectural models to demonstrate some of the new features and sent them to the Capitol Rotunda to spark the interest of Congressional appropriators.
The word "parkway" is key to understanding the other side of this innovative project. The National Park Service describes the artistic element with this poetic description:
"A parkway is not intended to be just a road. Rather it is conceived as a linear strip of parklands encompassing a comprehensive spectrum of environmental and visual elements and principles, similar to the ingredients used by an artist to compose a good painting. Parkway designers use terrain, space, trees, shrubs, rock outcroppings, water features, natural edges, and the roadway itself as elements of their artistic palates and combine them in a highly skilled manner to create expansive pictorial compositions . . . It is meant for comfortable driving in pleasant surroundings, not merely for getting from one place to another "
It's easy to think of the interstate highway system as laser-straight and devoid of scenery. Parkways are the opposite. Their meandering curves are optimized for beauty instead of speed. The GW Parkway surroundings were laid out with this in mind and enriched with oak, maple, poplar, beech, dogwood, hickory, walnut and sumock plantings.
In some places the side railings are a rustic wooden design, and in others you see more elaborate rough cut stone walls that are characteristic of 1930's public architecture. The parkway’s route was deliberately laid out to maximize long distance views of the Potomac and Washington skyline. There are numerous planned vistas, and pull offs with parks and picnic areas so pleasure drivers could enjoy the space.
Other than the proliferation of street signage in recent decades, the GW Parkway’s original aesthetic has been faithfully preserved into the present day.
In 1973, a group of outraged female Harvard activists took to the steps of the school's historic Lowell Hall and poured out jars of fake urine. The powers that be really should have let them use the bathroom.
The Harvard Pee-In of 1973 was the brainchild of legendary rabble rouser and activist Florynce "Flo" Kennedy. One of the first black women to graduate from Columbia Law School in 1951, Kennedy practiced law prior to devoting her life to activism. Inspired to battled discrimination and inequality, she often fought for feminist and African-American causes, becoming known for her radical, outspoken, and provocative rhetoric and actions.
Kennedy was instantly recognizable by her iconoclastic look, often sporting a cowboy hat, pink sunglasses, and loud outfits while she was out protesting the Miss America pageant or lecturing alongside other feminist luminaries such as Gloria Steinem. In a lengthy obituary in The New York Times (Kennedy passed away in 2000), former New York mayor David Dinkins was quoted as saying, “If you found a cause for the downtrodden of somebody being abused someplace, by God, Flo Kennedy would be there.”
So when some female students at Harvard realized that something had to be done about the lack of female bathrooms, they went straight to Kennedy.
In the early 1970s, Harvard was embroiled in a fight to bring the ratio of female to male students up to 50:50. (the ratio of men-women at Harvard didn’t become even until 2007), and issues of feminism were at the school were on everyone’s minds. But the question of where all of the female students would be able to go to the bathroom at the historically male university wasn’t necessarily everyone’s priority.
And yet, in at least one situation, the lack of available restrooms was actively affecting females’ ability to successfully enroll. In 1973, women took their exams in Lowell Hall, a historic campus building that was equipped with exactly one bathroom. And it was only for dudes.
Women taking part in the lengthy, timed exam process had to leave the building and head across the street to use a women’s bathroom, taking up crucial minutes and actively advantaging male applicants who didn’t have to worry about such inconveniences. This would not stand, and finally one third-year Harvard student reached out to Kennedy for a solution.
Kennedy had been quoted earlier in the year by The Harvard Crimson: “If you had to give the world an enema, you would put it in Harvard Yard. This has got to be the asshole of the world." When approached, she asked when the next exam was set to take place, and devised a unique protest to bring attention to the issue. According to an extensive first-hand account of the event from 1990, Kennedy dubbed her action “A Protest Pee-In On The Harvard Yard.”
Together with a group of fellow female activists, Kennedy led her protest group around Harvard Yard. They carried signs and banners with slogans like “To pee or not to pee, that is the question,” and “Will the dean let women use his personal toilet?” Most evocatively, many of them also carried jars of bright yellow liquid.
The group had gathered a crowd of onlookers as Kennedy finally took the steps of Lowell Hall and spoke. Kennedy gave a characteristically impassioned speech about the importance of gender equality in bathroom availability, pointing out how the disparity led to women feeling “niggerized” by the exclusion. She highlighted the fact that Harvard was built by men to cater to men, but that women have always been a huge part of the school’s fabric, if not always as students, then as secretaries and other workers. The lack of bathrooms wasn’t just an inconvenience, it was a sign of the institutionalized inequality at the school.
After Kennedy finished speaking and a poem about pay toilets was read, the assembled activists, one after another, took turns pouring the symbolic pee on the steps of Lowell Hall. According to that same 1990 account, one of the onlookers called foul, complaining that she thought they were actually going to urinate on the steps, even offering to do it herself. But at this Kennedy, quieted the crowd, saying, “Let the Dean of Harvard be warned. Unless Lowell Hall gets a room for women so that women taking exams don't have to hold it in, run across the street or waste time deciding whether to pee or not to pee, next year we will be back doing the real thing."
It’s unclear whether or not Kennedy’s protest led to any immediate changing of the bathroom rules in Lowell Hall, but according to a 2012 survey of Harvard bathrooms, the campus now has 91 gender non-specific restrooms across residential buildings, classroom buildings, and restrooms available in businesses. The school has come a long way from the days when women had to go on a minor field trip just to relieve themselves, but all of the handy places to urinate that exist today may have never opened their doors without the women who peed on the steps of Lowell Hall.
As climate change progresses, glaciers worldwide continue to melt, and Chile, which holds 82% of South America’s glaciated land, is no exception. In addition to warming temperatures, the glaciers of southern Chile are threatened by explosions and pollution caused by mining operations near and atop the glaciers—harmful practices that have prompted environmental advocacy group Greenpeace to take matters into its own hands.
On March 5, 2014, Greenpeace declared a new country, the “Glacier Republic,” consisting of all 8,800 square miles of glaciated Chilean land. This bold environmental declaration was Greenpeace’s best attempt to protect Chilean glaciers from the unpunished corporate gold mining practices that pollute and excavate the ice at unsustainable rates.
The reason for the previous lack of environmental protection in the area was that, according to Greenpeace Chile director Matías Asún, Chile's Constitution and water code exluded glaciers as public goods in need of protection. According to Asún, this legal loophole gives Greenpeace the ability to lay claim to the icy expanse.
Since the republic’s inception, Greenpeace has worked to ensure that the Glacier Republic can qualify as an actual nation. As of now, the unrecognized state has a population of over 165,000 petition signers, as well as a flag, a Declaration of Independence, a tent in the Andes serving as the capital, and 40 international embassies (conveniently located in Greenpeace’s international offices), satisfying all of the requirements for statehood outlined in the Montevideo Convention.
The group pledges to maintain its claims to sovereignty until all mining near glaciated areas is completely abandoned, including the Chilean government's proposed expansion of the Andina copper mine, which would, if enacted, destroy nearly 20 square miles of glaciers and contaminate the watershed that provides water for six million Chileans.
As of today, the Glacier Republic is not recognized by any member of the United Nations, and unfortunately for Greenpeace, environmental protection has once again taken a back seat to economic opportunity.
In June of 2014, archaeologist Meg Watters led a team of five Revolutionary War reenactors through a forest in Minute Man National Park, on the edge of Lexington, Massachusetts. It was damp out, and the reenactors had traded period garb for rain slickers, hiking boots, and metal detectors, which they slowly swept over the ground.
Their first few dozen pings were all useless—cans, bits of wire—but eventually, they found what they were looking for: a gritty, rusted sphere, about the size of a large blueberry. "We actually hit a musket ball," says Watters. "It was like, alright! Here we go!"
Two years later, Watters and her team have successfully used that musket ball—and 31 others—to recreate Parker's Revenge, a legendary but little-understood skirmish that took place on the first day of the Revolutionary War.A few weeks ago, the Parker's Revenge Historical Project released their final report on the battle, capping off a multi-year project and solving a centuries-long mystery.
All Americans are conversant in the better-known events of those first Revolutionary days—Paul Revere's ride, the "shot heard 'round the world," the bloodshed at Lexington and Concord. Parker's Revenge is more of a deep cut. It lasted only ten minutes, and just one first-person account of it exists, a spare description from a militiaman named Nathan Munroe. ("We met the [British] regulars in the bounds of Lincoln, about noon, retreating towards Boston," it reads, in part. "We fired on them, and continued to do so until they met their reinforcements in Lexington.")
But those who do know about the battle hold it up as an exemplar of Revolutionary courage. Captain John Parker, who had brought 77 men to that morning's Battle of Lexington, lost 18 of them to death and injuries before heading after the retreating British. "So he takes 20% casualties, patches up his men, and makes the decision to march after this force, which was ten times the size of his," says Robert Morris, President of the Friends of Minute Man Natioal Park. "This was just an incredibly heroic effort that we wanted to document, research, and preserve for future generations."
Thus far, doing so has involved three years of multidisciplinary research, with Watters and her team digging through archives, data, and dirt to piece the battle together. The first step was finding the battlefield—although the general area was known, everyone had different ideas of where exactly the fight took place. Watters sifted through historical documentation, taking into account everything from oral reports of the day's other fights to tax records and land conveyances.
She also brought in an ecological design expert, who pointed out how the landscape likely differed 240 years ago. Slowly, a picture of the past began to emerge: what is now new growth forest and a wetland was pastures, meadows, and an orchard. There was a barn in one spot, and a road in another.
One they had narrowed down the setting, Watters and her team of volunteers went over 25 acres of it with sophisticated metal detectors. In response, several distinct eras of history reared up to meet them. For a large chunk of the 19th and 20th centuries, the area had been filled with houses, and the ground was covered in the debris from hundreds of lives. Nails from 1890 mingled with beer can tabs from 1970. After a thorough sweep, they had found "thousands of pieces of trash and 29 musket balls," Watters says.
Next, a revolutionary ballistics expert carefully examined each musket ball to determine whether it had been British or Colonial. They mapped where the balls had fallen, and did what are called "viewshed analyses," where they determined what parts of the land would have been visible by a Colonial soldier marching on foot or a British officer on horseback.
Researchers made use of a battlefield analysis strategy, known as KOCOA, that focuses on what fighters think about when they see a landscape—"things like, where would be a good place to take cover? What were the obstacles? What, from their perspective, was the line of fire, the line of sight, and the key terrain?" Watters explains.
When they had gathered all the data, they held what Watters calls a "military tactical review event." Ecologists, historians, veterans, and military commanders pored over the available information, walked the field, and discussed what, exactly, needed to have happened for the pieces to fit together in the way that they did.
"We determined what happened in the field, based on everyone's expertise," Watters says. "All tied together by the archaeological artifacts—by those musket balls that were dug out of the ground."
The story they found goes as follows: after the Battle of Lexington, Captain Parker and his men came to the boundary of the town and set themselves up at a bend in the road, at the edge of a large woodlot. There, hidden by trees and boulders, they waited for the British, who were retreating from Concord towards Boston.
As the British approached, they sent a vanguard ahead to engage —but before they could organize themselves, the Lexington militia fired, one shot each. They then retreated over a small hill. The British fired at their backs. In this way, Parker had his brief revenge.
Within this broad summary, small details paint an even more human picture. The placement of one Colonial musket ball means a militiaman probably dropped it as he retreated. Distribution of fire suggests that some soldiers ran more quickly than others—as one army historian commented, "The young guys would have taken off fast while the older fat guys would have taken more time to get their things together and move.”
Now that the initial research is complete, Morris says, it's time to tell the public this story—to reincorporate Parker's Revenge into the park itself. "This may include things like restoring colonial stone walls and rehabilitating a colonial-era orchard" to return the land to a historically representative state, he says. Walkways may lead visitors through the battlefield, pointing out the positions of both troops. Those telltale musket balls will get their own display case in the lobby.
One group has already benefited from the new information: the reenactors. Representatives from 12 different reenactment groups—Redcoats and Minutemen alike—volunteered on the project, helping with everything from site preparation to metallic surveying. On Patriot's Day of this year, reenactors were able to play out Parker's Revenge exactly where it took place 241 years ago, and future run-throughs will be able to incorporate even more detail.
"That's kind of an emotional thing for reenactors, to actually be standing where people stood," says Morris. Ed Hurley, one of the volunteers, felt transported back centuries: "Each time [I found a musket ball] my first thought was of the individual who had last touched the ball," he is quoted as saying in the project report. "Who was he? What was he feeling?"
Archaeology can't quite tell us that. But thanks to the renewed dedication of Hurley and others, the land will keep giving up the secrets it can. "A few of [the reenactors] have since gone on to be crazy archeology metal detecting guys," Watters says. If there's more history out there, they'll find it.
Yesterday, construction workers in Augsburg, Germany, unearthed a holiday surprise—a 3.8-ton bomb, dropped on the city by Britain during World War II and still primed to explode.
In response, authorities are evacuating the town, starting Christmas morning, the BBC reports. This will give experts a chance to defuse it with little risk. The evacuation will be the biggest since the war ended, comprising 32,000 households and 54,000 residents.
Logistically, a holiday is a great time to evacuate a town and defuse a bomb—there's little traffic, work doesn't get interrupted, and families are already primed to keep track of each other.
Emotionally, it's probably a bit less ideal. The residents of Augsburg will be spending Christmas in schools, sports halls, and an exhibition center—here's hoping they have a good one.
A walk along Grand Street in Mamaroneck is much like a walk along any other street in the suburbs around New York City. That is until you reach number 175. Known as the Seely House, it has the same homey charm as its neighbors, with one exception: It’s only 10 feet wide.
The house was built in 1932 by a local contractor named Nathan Seely. In the boom years of the 1920s, Nathan ran a successful home-building company together with his brother, Willard. They bought land in Mamaroneck and built houses for the African-Americans moving from the South during the Great Migration.
The Stock Market Crash of 1929 changed everything. Nathan Seely lost his business, and the beautiful home he built for his wife Lillian went into foreclosure. Left with nothing, Nathan’s friend and neighbor Panfilo Santangelo offered him a 12 1/2-foot-wide strip of land that ran between the two houses. To seal the deal, Nathan paid Panfilo one dollar.
With no money to buy materials, Nathan used whatever he could find: the basement was held up by a salvaged railroad tie; a chicken coop was used in the living room. Nearing completion, Nathan tethered his new three-story home to the ground with steel cables, to keep it stable in high winds.
The Seelys lived at number 175 until 1962, when Nathan passed away. In 1988, Panfilo’s daughter, Ida, bought the house from the Seely family, and began renting it out. Although empty now (a bad case of termites), it’s still owned by the Santangelo family.
A desire to preserve this odd, little house runs deep in both Nathan and Panfilo’s descendants. The Santangelos are working to raise funds for restoration, while Nathan’s great-granddaughter, Julie, is working on a book called Skinny House, with proceeds to go toward the repairs. In 2015, the Seely House was placed on the National Register of Historic Places, giving new hope for the survival of a local symbol of neighborliness.
Named after the accomplished Dominican botanist who cataloged the considerable range of plant life of Hispaniola, the Dr. Rafael M. Moscoso National Botanical Garden was founded in 1976. Covering 400 acres (160 hectares), the park showcases the remarkable endemism in both the birds and vegetation native to the second-largest island in the Caribbean.
The garden features collections of bromeliads, ferns, palms, succulents, medicinal plants, and an exhibit of over 300 types of orchids. The expansive, well-maintained park is also a popular destination for bird watchers, as a wide variety of avian species—both familiar and rare—make either permanent or transitory homes in the Dominican Republic. A traditional Japanese garden can also be found on the premises.
The park's symbol, found throughout in various representations, is the leaf of a guanito, which is a palm tree common to the garden.
On the top floor of the Otago Museum in Dunedin, New Zealand, where there are taxidermied circus lions, a tooth from the largest species of shark to ever have existed on Earth, and delicate glass models of sea creatures, lies one specimen that stands out from the rest: a large jar that contains eight rats in a yellowish preserving fluid, their jumbled bodies sunk to the bottom to reveal a thick, floating knot of tails tying them together.
The jar’s label reads, simply, “Rat King,” identifying it as a phenomenon that for centuries has been both mythologized, even if the rat king—a group of rats with their tails tied up to each other’s—may not even actually exist. Or, at least, occur in nature. All of which hasn’t stopped popular culture from elevating it to myth, popping up in numerous works of fiction, often as a bad omen, a representation of plague, or associated with witchcraft. But experts, for one thing, are skeptical, even as, throughout history, they keep turning up. What most people can agree on is that they are gross, and, if they do occur naturally, would be about as unpleasant for the rats as they might be for human observers.
“Rodents stuck together could not survive long and are probably in agony and distress until they separate or die,” says Kevin Rowe, a rat expert and the senior curator of mammals at the Museum Victoria in Australia. “A ‘rat king’ would be a horrible ball of animal suffering; nothing about it evokes a sense of kingship.”
Rat kings have been reported since the 1500s, and have been documented across the world. People who think they form naturally theorize that up to a few dozen rats—perhaps the young offspring of the same mother—tie their tails together when confined to small spaces, or when cold temperatures force them together to stay warm. Rattus rattus, known as the ship rat or the black rat, is the only type to have been documented in rat kings, though the same phenomenon has been found among other small mammals like squirrels.
“Ship rats, according to some theories, are climbing rats, so their tails have… a grasping reflex,” says Emma Burns, the curator of natural science at the Otago Museum. “In the nest, they form a hold.”
A bunch of adept, grasping tails might, in other words, be able to get themselves tangled. And in the presence of a binding agent, like sebum—a sticky, oily substance that comes from the rats’ skin—or their urine or feces, the knot might become inextricable. Which is Burns’ theory, at least, for how the rat king on display at the Otago museum formed. It was discovered sometime in the 1930s, she says, when it dropped from the rafters onto the clerks at a shipping office. One of the clerks reportedly beat the writhing mass with a pitchfork. Not long after that, the dead specimen ended up in the hands of a museum curator.
Rat experts, meanwhile, are a bit more skeptical, though they concede that a naturally occurring rat king is at least … possible. “When it is very cold rats may use one another for heat, bringing those long tails into direct contact, wrapping around one another,” says Michael Parsons, a scholar-in-residence at Hofstra University who developed a remote sensing technique to better understand rat behavior in urban environments. “Rat kings might be more common than thought—they just don’t persist very long as the tails would unwind as temperatures rose, or (gasp!) when one rat gnaws off its own, or another rat’s, tail.”
Others have different theories.
“Rat kings may just be a myth that a few people have perpetuated with fake examples,” says Matthew Combs, a doctoral student focusing on rats at Fordham University, even if the motivations of the modern rat king fabricator are less than clear, and the fabrication itself not necessarily easy. The fabricator, for one, would have to tie the rats’ tails together after they were dead, since doing so while they were alive would be “virtually impossible,” Burns notes.
Still, real or not, rat kings might always be with us, the result of humans’ loathing of rats themselves. More rats together, in our eyes, just means more of the things we revile about rats in the first place.
“In medieval times, people were pretty anti-rat, especially if you saw some seething mass.,” Burns says. “People really just don’t like rats.”
And, for her, the research goes on. She and her collaborators plan to take a closer look at the knot in their specimen to figure out what kind of adhesive stuck the tails together and to create a model using X-rays for how the rats might have gotten themselves tangled in the first place.
Lab studies with live rats, meanwhile, could, in theory, be done, but, Combs says there wouldn’t be much point.
“An observation of a rat king forming from start to finish in a lab setting would be the ultimate support,” he says, “but that seems like it would take a good deal of time and luck and precious lab funding.”
Which means that, for now, the myth, at least, will live on.
Outside of Sala, a small town in southern Sweden, there is some decidedly un-Scandinavian architecture. Minarets, domes and ornamental arcades dot the landscape of a miniature version of Istanbul, as seen through the eyes of a unique city planner.
The man behind Little Istanbul is Jan-Erik Swennberg, and the story of his personal journey to create a Turkish city goes back a few decades. He was diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome at an early age, and it’s not uncommon for people with Asperger’s to have an intense focus and interest in one topic. In 1979, Jan-Erik turned his focus to Turkey.
It all began during a trip to Bulgaria, a holiday that included a three-day excursion to Istanbul. Jan-Erik fell in love with the hectic, beautiful, crazy, ancient, modern city. The jumble of building styles from millennia of construction, spear-like towers piercing the sky, car exhaust curling around smoky incense—it was all fascinating and mysterious, if not a little intimidating to the young traveler.
After the trip, his interest in Turkey and Istanbul grew and grew, and was soon channeled into creating a small-scale version of the Sultan Ahmed Mosque (aka the Blue Mosque) in his family garden. At first Jan-Erik’s father was skeptical, fearing the neighbors might laugh. But they didn’t, and construction continued. Today there are about 20 model buildings of Istanbul landmarks spread throughout the garden. They are all there: the Dolmabahçe Palace, the Yavuz Selim Mosque, the Topkapı Palace, and the Blue Mosque that started it all.
What might be most impressive about the garden mini-city is that it has all been built from one man’s own perspective, no drawings, plans or blueprints—and all from salvaged material from the local dump and recycling bins.
It took Noah Forman about 26 minutes to accomplish, but earlier this month, he achieved a personal driving goal: hitting 240 consecutive green lights in Manhattan, which he says is a record.
Forman had previously hit over 100 consecutive green lights in 2014, but, on Tuesday, December 6, very early in the morning, he set out to beat that.
"I wasn't satisfied with that number. These two years have gone by and much has changed: people are driving slower, stopping in random places, crossing four lanes of traffic," Forman, a taxi driver, told Gothamist.
Many stop lights in Manhattan are timed to the expected speed of drivers, which means that if you drive the speed limit up, say, Third Avenue without obstructions, you're likely to catch several green lights in a row. Which appears to be the part of the strategy Forman used, in addition to some luck.
"I was hoping to push my goal up to a large number like 500 green lights," he told Gothamist, "but I'll settle for this: no stopping, smooth, well mostly smooth sailing, for an estimated 240 lights, one yellow, all the rest green."
On the grounds of the old Hobo Railroad in the White Mountains of northern New Hampshire, there are caves, tunnels, fountains, slides and sculptures made of icicles. They call them Ice Castles, kind of like those dribble castles you make from wet sand at the beach. But these are full-scale, manmade stalactites and stalagmites (which is which again?), lit up at night to an icy glow.
The Ice Castles project originated in Utah, and each year the creators go to wintry locations to set up a series of drip pipes to start the process of trickling out their icicles—the “seeds” of the castles. These icicles then form the basis of the structures, which are made entirely of ice and snow.
This year there are Ice Castles in Midway, Utah, Stillwater, Minnesota, Wisconsin Dells, Wisconsin, Edmonton, Alberta, and these beauties in Lincoln. (Needless to say, it has to be pretty cold to get your icicles properly dribbled.)
The creation of Utah designer Brent Christensen, his ice teams start forming the castles weeks before the doors open for the season in late December-early January (a little earlier in Edmonton, but their weather is ready for it). Every day thousands of new icicles are formed and added, and the sculpting and coaxing of the ice and snow results in new tunnels and caves, so that the whole castle keeps building and building—until the end of winter. By March, when the icicles start to melt and all the pipes are packed up, the Ice Castles have grown by hundreds of thousands of sparkly, spiky icicles.
