Starting tomorrow, commuters in northern Norway who flip on their car radios as they head into work may be greeted with the sweet sound of... nothing.
In a world first, the Norwegian government will begin turning off the country's FM radio network on Wednesday morning, Agence France-Presse reports. The shutoff will start in the Arctic town of Bodø tomorrow, and will slowly spread southward over the course of the year.
FM is being run out of town by Digital Audio Broadcasting, which is cheaper and, supporters say, offers more reliable sound quality. It also has room for more channels, and better lends itself to things like broadcast archiving.
Although other European countries are also considering a switch—Switzerland is next in line—these concerns are more urgent in Norway, where a spread-out population and rollercoaster topography mean it's expensive to get a signal to everyone.
But there are some holes in the new system, too—on the user side. Most cars aren't equipped with DAB radios, and adaptors can be expensive. A recent poll found that only 17 percent of those surveyed supported the switch. "It's completely stupid, I don't need any more channels than I've already got," Oslo resident Eivind Sethov told AFP.
In a possible homage to those who think this decision is bad luck, Bodø will switch off its local FM station at 11:11:11 AM tomorrow, January 11. Until then, don't touch that dial.
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.
When American families sat down for dinner in 1918, the table would often be lined with meatless and wheatless dishes. Depending on the day, a meal might start off with rolls made with a blend of graham and rye flour, a main course of broiled salt mackerel, and end with a piece of Lintz Tart—a pastry made without wheat flour.
After the United States joined the Allies in World War I in April 1917, the tightened food regulations altered the pantries, recipes, and diets of people on the home front. To help manage wartime supply, conversation, distribution, and transportation of food, the government created the U.S. Food Administration, helmed by future president Herbert Hoover. Part of the department's role was to invent dishes—and reinvent favorite ones—to help Americans integrate alternative ingredients into their meals.
The U.S. Food Administration wartime photos and recipes, discovered by the National Archives and Records Administration, reveal almond paste cannoli, Alcazar Cakes made with potato flour, and tests to perfect the “War Bread” loaf. Confectioners even came up with candies made out of honey, molasses, and maple sugar instead of cane sugar.
“For me, it was exciting because I really enjoy this kind of history,” says Kelsey Noel, an archivist at the National Archives and Records Administration who helped digitize the photos. “Having this ability to see into the daily lives of the people who had to hold down the home front is really cool.”
About five months after the United States entered the war, Hoover led a campaign to eliminate waste and distribute food and resources to Allied forces in the barren battlefields of Europe. The effort relied mainly on volunteerism. By October 1917, the administration persuaded almost half of the nation’s 24 million families to sign pledge cards adhering to food rationing.
Beef, pork, wheat, dairy products, and sugars were rationed and sent to the soldiers abroad. Herds of cattle had been depleted or deliberately killed off because of the lack of fodder. Wheat was more easily transportable than other vegetables and fruits.
The administration stated that people didn’t need to eat less to save, but simply find substitutes for foods that were in high demand. Families shifted their diets to poultry and fish in place of beef and mutton. Wheat was replaced by potato flour, corn, oats, and rye in baked goods. Vegetable oils replaced animal fats.
“These particular recipes [from the U.S. Food Administration Educational Division] were mainly about finding other cereals to substitute for the wheat or wheat flour,” says Noel. The recipes feature "a lot of rye" as well as some bran.
For example, a batch of a dozen Biltmore Bran Muffins calls for bran and rye flour instead of wheat flour, and a half-pint of molasses instead of sugar. Sixty pieces of sweet Genoa Cake (which contains no flour at all) requires two pounds of almond paste, sugar, and 20 eggs all beaten together with corn starch and melted butter.
The U.S. Food Administration turned to home economists for advice on how to use these food substitutes, creating an Education Division. Individuals experimented with ingredients to see what tasted and worked best in dishes. During World War I, potato flour was extensively used for mixing with other bread flours, according to the U.S. Tariff Commission. It became a prime ingredient in “War Bread,” which was ubiquitous in homes and military kitchens.
“They seemed to be pushing potatoes,” says Noel, who has tried baked goods made with potato flour and deems them “very good.”
The administration found that potato flour’s ability to absorb moisture allowed bakers to produce a greater number of loaves than they would only using wheat flour in the bread. In 1918, the five potato flour factories in the United States produced 2,500,000 pounds of flour.
The department also came up with alternative recipes for sweets. The ships that imported sugar from the Caribbean were repurposed into military vessels limiting trade, explains Tanfer Emin Tunc in the journal War in History.
“Sugar has been costly, but whether this was due to a real shortage or to manipulation we did not know,” writes Mary Elizabeth who wrote War Time Candies, and proposed different kinds of candies made from honey, molasses, maple sugar, fruits, nuts, raisins, and chocolate.
Informational materials were primarily catered to women, who drove food production, purchase, and preparation. Editors from women’s magazines joined the Education Division and helped publish planned menus in pamphlets, magazines, newspapers, and cookbooks. Approximately 80 percent of content between 1917 and 1918 contained advice to homemakers in the form of menus, recipes, short articles, and special holiday food tips, writes Stephen Ponder in Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly.
Posters and billboards covered city buildings, advertising that “Food Will Win the War.” On certain days throughout the week, families were encouraged to design meals without meat or wheat flour. “‘Wheatless Mondays and Wednesdays, Meatless Tuesdays, and Porkless Thursdays and Saturdays’ became a mantra in many households,” writes Tunc.
The administration also discouraged stockpiling food, warning that food hoarders were “working against the common good and even against the very safety of the country.”
The campaign succeeded in doubling food shipment to Europe within a year, and reducing the United States’ consumption by 15 percent from 1918 to 1919.
Noel hopes the World War I recipes will inspire others to share their own family’s wartime recipes that have been passed down by generations. Recipes are unique in that they are kind of tangible history that people can interact with, explains Noel. “There’s something that’s very personal when looking at recipes and food.”
When I told friends in the Pennsylvania suburb where I grew up that I was going to college in Canada, their responses tended to come in two forms. One was about the weather; to a southern Pennsylvanian, any temperature below 25 degrees Fahrenheit is cause for panic. The other was a volley of linguistic stereotypes about the nation of Canada, involving either “aboot” or “eh.”
Canadians are not particularly amused when you eagerly point out their “eh” habit, but the word has become emblematic of the country in a way that is now mostly out of their control. In response, some have embraced it, adopting it as an element of Canadian patriotism. But what even is this word? How did it come to be so associated with Canada?
“Eh” is what’s known as an invariant tag—something added on to the end of a sentence that’s the same every time it’s used. A tag, in linguistics, is a word or sound or short phrase added after a thought which changes that thought in some way. The most common tags are question tags, which change a thought into a question. “It’s a nice day, isn’t it?” would be one example. The tag “isn’t it” turns that statement of fact into something that could prompt a response; the speaker is asking for confirmation or rejection.
But “isn’t it” is a variant tag, because it will change based on the subject and tense of what came before it. If you’re talking about a plural subject, you’ll have to change that tag to “aren’t they,” and if you’re talking about something in the past you might have to change it to “wasn’t it.”
“Eh” is invariant because it doesn’t change at all based on what you’re talking about; it remains “eh” whether you’re talking about one subject or many, now or in the past. But it’s also a lot more flexible than other tags—it isn’t just a question tag, but can be used for all kinds of things, and Canadians exploit this capability.
There are a few major ways a Canadian could use “eh.” The first is while stating an opinion: “It’s a nice day, eh?” Another would be as an exclamation tag, which is added to a sentence in order to indicate surprise: “What a game, eh?” Or you could use it for a request or command: “Put it over here, eh?” And then there’s the odd example of using it within a criticism: “You really messed that one up, eh?”
Jack Chambers, a linguist at the University of Toronto, writes that these “ehs” are all of a piece. “All of these uses have one pragmatic purpose in common: they all show politeness,” he wrote in a 2014 paper. Using “eh” to end the statement of an opinion or an explanation is a way for the speaker to express solidarity with the listener. It’s not exactly asking for reassurance or confirmation, but it’s not far off: the speaker is basically saying, hey, we’re on the same page here, we agree on this.
Even in the use of “eh” as a criticism or a command, the word seeks to find common ground. If I say “you’re an idiot, eh?”, what I’m saying is, you’re an idiot, but you should also think you’re an idiot, and our understanding of you as an idiot finds us on common ground.
As a command, “eh” is singularly weird. Elaine Gold, the founder of the Canadian Language Museum and a recently retired lecturer at the University of Toronto who’s studied “eh,” used the example of a military sergeant shouting, “Forward march, eh?” It’s a command, but emphasizes that the listeners agree with it, that somehow the decision to march has been made and agreed upon by everyone. In that sense it also serves to weaken the speaker’s position: it removes the speaker from a place of power and puts some of that power in the hands of the listener. Theoretically, in response to “Forward march, eh?”, a listener could say, well, no, I’d rather not. It invites the listener to be a part of the speaker’s statements.
The final and most unusual use of “eh” is in what’s called a “narrative ‘eh’.” This is the variety you’ll hear in skits like SCTV’s Bob and Doug McKenzie: it’s found during stories, following individual clauses. “So I was walking down the street, eh? And I saw a friend of mine at the store, eh? And so I thought I’d say hi, eh?”
This use of “eh” is a bit different from the others; Chambers says the narrative “eh” is used to indicate to listeners that the story is continuing, to make sure the listener is still listening, and to signal that the listener should not interrupt because there’s more to come.
“Eh” has proven to be a very difficult thing to study; as an oral tic, it’s rarely written down, and studies have relied on self-reporting—basically, asking people whether and how they use the word. “It's a very hard thing to do research on, really hard to quantify how much it's used, who uses it, how it's used,” she says. Those self-reported studies are necessarily flawed, as Canadians have a tendency to underestimate their use of the word. Gold told me about several instances in which people insist they hardly ever say “eh,” before using the word without realizing it in subsequent thoughts. (“I hardly ever say ‘eh,’ eh?”)
Because it’s so hard to study, it’s not really known where “eh” came from, or precisely when it entered the Canadian lexicon. Gold says that by the 1950s, the word was firmly established enough that in some articles it’s already identified as a Canadianism. Today, it’s actually heard outside the country as well; the sections of the U.S. Upper Midwest that border Canada often have “eh” speakers, and it’s fairly common in New Zealand as well. It is possible that the word came originally from some population of Scots-Irish immigrants, a major early group in Canada. “Eh” is still used in Scotland and in Northern England, but it’s used in a much more limited way, primarily to indicate that the listener hasn’t heard the speaker—it means “what?,” or “pardon?” In Canada, it’s mutated into a much more versatile interjection.
With the caveat that self-reported studies are not all that accurate, Canadian linguists seem to agree that “eh” is much less common in Canada’s cities and more common in rural areas, especially in the sparsely-populated west. “It’s considered rural, lower-class, male, less educated,” says Gold. Aside from males, those groups are all stigmatized, which means that any language features associated with those groups are stigmatized as well. Within Canada, saying “eh,” especially the narrative “eh,” is considered kind of a hick thing to do. This does not appear to have lessened the essential Canadianness of the word.
Other dialects of English and other languages have some similar tags. “Right,” “okay,” “yes,” and “you know” are all used in some of the same ways as “eh.” In French, “hein” (pronounced “anh,” the same vowel sound in “splat”) is quite similar, as is the Japanese “ne,” the Dutch “hè,” the Yiddish “nu,” and the Spanish “¿no?” These differ in some ways from “eh,” as “eh” can be used in some ways that the other tags cannot be and vice versa, but what really makes “eh” different is less about the way it’s used and more about its place in Canadian society.
“It's really come to mean Canadian identity, especially in print. Even though urban people might not be using it so much anymore, in print it's huge,” says Gold. The stereotype of Canadians saying “eh” is so strong that Canadians have ended up reclaiming the word for themselves, even those Canadians who don’t actually use it very often. A popular children’s book about Canadian culture is titled “From Eh? To Zed.” The first prime minister of Canada, Sir John A. Macdonald, is often referred to as “Sir John Eh.”
This isn’t uncommon; groups have a tendency to snag linguistic stereotypes and wave them with pride. In the US, perhaps the best example would be the citizens of Pittsburgh, who have turned “yinz,” their take on “y’all,” into mugs, t-shirts, and banners, and even refer to themselves as “Yinzers.” It’s messy when applied to an entire country, especially one as varied as Canada—a significant part of the population would never use the word, and would instead use “hein”—but it’s stuck.
“Eh” may be associated with another stereotype of Canadians: the idea that they’re polite to a fault. After all, as Chambers noted, “eh” is a signal of politeness and seeking accord. Wouldn’t it stand to reason that an unfailingly polite population would make good use of “eh”? But Elaine Gold, who I should add was extremely polite during our conversation, disagrees. “There have been lots of articles about how ‘eh’ is used because we’re so nice. Like where someone else would make a strong statement, we undermine it a little, because we want to be friendly and inclusive,” she says. “I don’t know how much of that is true.”
But when your country’s most identifiable linguistic feature is a word that indicates inclusiveness, an openness to discourse, and a moderating effect on strong statements, it’s not such a crazy thing to assume that perhaps those qualities might be found in the people of that country as well. Even if the stereotype of the obsequious Canuck comes from outside the country, from brash Americans who don’t much care whether or not the listener feels included in their statements, Canadians have claimed “eh” as their own.
During the 19th century mineral rush that earned Nevada the nickname "the Silver State," boom towns popped up left and right across the desert. Unfortunately, only a few survived. The rest were abandoned. Houses, schools, saloons, hotels, general stores, and mines were left to deteriorate amidst the tumbleweeds.
Fortunately for adventurers, many of these ghost towns have survived into the 21st century, albeit a little worse for wear. Here are six eerily empty ghost towns in Nevada awaiting your exploration.
Like many Nevada ghost towns, Belmont was a silver boom town. It was founded in 1866 and it grew fast: Within two decades it was a full-fledged town. It was the seat of Nye County, and it had a music hall and a hotel named the Cosmopolitan. But Belmont's good fortune didn't last. The silver mines were tapped out and the shifting prices of minerals left the town unable to keep up economically. By the early 1900s the town was already on its way to being deserted.
Perhaps because of its intense though short-lived success, Belmont's buildings are surprisingly well preserved. The courthouse, a saloon, and a couple of mills are still standing, while portions of other buildings remain. The little ghost town hidden in the shadow of the Toquima Mountains has won some admirers. A restoration group is working on preserving the ruins while a period-authentic bed and breakfast has opened for business on what used to be Main Street. Further down the road is Dirty Dick's Saloon, a recreation of the town's first bar.
St. Thomas was founded by a tiny group of Mormon settlers in the 1860s who believed they were proving ground in Utah. When both the settlers and the state realized that they were in fact in Nevada, the government brought down taxes on the residents, including owed taxes from previous years. Unable to fork over the gold the state was demanding, the town was abandoned in 1871. It was inhabited off and on over the following decades, but when the Hoover Dam was built a new lake emerged from the rising waters of the Colorado River, which completely drowned St. Thomas.
Today, after rampant water consumption has drastically lowered the level of the lake, the remains of St. Thomas are beginning to surface. Building foundations and chimneys are beginning to rise above the water, reminding visitors of the town that once was.
Nelson was once the site of the scandalous Techatticup Mine. An area rich in gold, silver, copper and lead, the land was mostly settled by Civil War deserters, and was the site of one of the largest booms the state of Nevada ever encountered. Its seedy population coupled with land disputes made for many fights, many of which ended in murder. This bloodshed coupled with frequent flash flooding from El Dorado Canyon left Nelson uninhabitable before long.
What remains of Nelson lies above the flood channels, a few scattered ranch houses, the remnants of a Texaco station, and the standard weather-torn buildings and machinery. Used as the location for many photo shoots, music videos and several films, the site features one unusual spectacle of a small aircraft seemingly smashed nose-first into a dune. The plane is not a true relic, but a fabricated wreck from the 2001 crime film 3000 Miles to Graceland.
Anson Phelps Stokes was a wealthy railroad magnate who poured his money into development and infrastructure in the desert outside Austin, including this castle, the most lasting piece of his legacy. The three-story structure was commissioned by Stokes in 1896. It was modeled after an Italian tower and constructed from local granite. In its heyday, the tower was lavishly decorated; each floor had a fireplace, and the Stokes family could look out over their surrounding land from two balconies and the battlement terrace on the roof.
The Stokes reign, however, was short. The family traveled west in 1897 and spent about a month in the castle. It would be their only visit. A little less than a year later, embroiled in an embezzlement scandal and the silver mine’s decline, Stokes sold both the mine and his brand new castle. It lay abandoned for many year until it was purchased by a distant relative in 1956. Now listed on the National Register of Historic Places, the idiosyncratic tower endures, not quite like anything else you’ll see along an American roadside.
Unionville's story is that of so many boom towns. It grew quickly in the decade after the Civil War during a silver rush, then declined just as quickly when the mines dried up. As such, many buildings in the hamlet of Unionville appear frozen in time, unchanged since when they were abandoned in the 1870s and '80s.
Visitors come to gaze upon the cabin Mark Twain once lived in and leave but the scant residents of Unionville (there are roughly 20) assure there is lots more to be found in the surprisingly lush valley. There is a B&B in town, and apparently fish are plentiful and neighbors are friendly.
Gold Point (also known as Lime Point and Hornsilver at different points in its history) was more successful than other mine towns, operating prolifically even through the Great Depression until World War II called for a halt on nonessential mining. After this the town was largely deserted, and would have been left for dead if not for Herb Robbins, a Las Vegas wallpaperer who visited Gold Point and fell under its spell. He and a friend each purchased homes for sale in town, later convincing others to do the same. After winning big in Vegas, Robbins was able to practically purchase all of Gold Point. He set about restoring buildings to open them to the public, all while simultaneously acting as fire chief and sheriff.
Visitors can stop by Gold Point and stay awhile. The cabins, though beaten by time on the outside, have been beautifully restored and filled with precious antiques on the inside. The sheriff will be happy to regale you with stories of its history illustrated by his 9,000 photos of local mining history. Proper "miner's breakfasts" are provided and if you're lucky, there might even be a gunfight while you're in town. Staged, of course.
Each city has its own origin story for punk. It spread from New York City to London in the mid-70s with a Ramones show. The Sex Pistols in turn helped it spread through middle America on a tour. Around the same time, bands started up in Los Angeles.
There are bound to be a lot of different stories about where the first punk show was in LA, but most can agree on what the first punk club was: The Masque.
The Masque was born when Scottish-Irish transplant Brendan Mullen stumbled into a doorway from an alley off filthy Hollywood Blvd looking for a practice spot. A basement to a large building on the corner of Cherokee and Hollywood, it was a steal in early 1977—$850 a month for 10,000 square feet.
Scores of bands showed up immediately, and the practice spot turned out to be a great place to do full shows. Weekend parties turned into gigs with incredible flyers. It became an instant mecca for true weirdos and outsiders, where boys and girls of every background were all welcome on stage. The venue was located under the famed porn house, the Pussycat Theatre. There is even a stairway that leads nowhere, up into the ceiling.
The graffiti soon piled up, especially as many of the bands and fans were artists. Band names, lewd sayings and poetic thoughts became the building's historical plaques. In January 1978, just five months after the first show, The Masque had its last official show, so ordered by the Los Angeles fire marshall. The practicing and occasional private parties with bands kept going through the year. But other clubs had opened elsewhere, and with them the punk scene took off.
Remarkably, the original graffiti has survived while the rest of the art deco building has been restored. The occasional photo shoot still happens there too. The great news is the current company, World of Wonder, celebrates outsiders and recognized the basement as an incredible landmark to art and the punk scene. The former basement venue serves as the company's video archive now, filled up with videotapes, boxes and props. But the walls remain preserved, reminding us what punk really meant when it started.
Built in the pastoral expanses of colonial Harlem, Alexander Hamilton's two-story Federal-style family home was completed in 1802, a scant two years before the Founding Father was shot by then-vice president Aaron Burr in the infamous Weehawken duel.
Though more or less forgotten for a century, The Grange is currently experiencing a resurgence of visitors, owing in no small part to the explosive popularity of the musical Hamilton. It's even adopted the phrase "It's quiet uptown" from the show as the new, unofficial slogan.
The Grange—named after Hamilton's grandfather's estate in Scotland—remained with Hamilton's wife, Eliza, after his death. Correspondence shows that she did not maintain the home as her primary residence for very long, however. By 1889, The Grange had been foreclosed and condemned, and was scheduled to be razed to make way for the ever-expanding Manhattan street grid, which was just starting to reach Harlem. Instead, St. Luke's Episcopal Church purchased the home and moved it two blocks south, stripping the house of many features along the way, including replacing several picturesque windows with a makeshift door, allowing The Grange to conform to the newly laid out street patterns.
Over the next 30 years, the house was mainly used for storage by the church. Two large buildings were eventually erected on either side of The Grange, one actually wrapping around the house, with the other flush against the side of it. In addition to effectively hiding The Grange, this also caused further damage to the historic home.
In 1924, The American Scenic and Historic Preservation Society came to the rescue, buying the Grange and transforming it into a public museum, adding random Colonial furniture and artifacts from the Hamilton family. In 1960, the home was designated a National Historic Landmark and purchased by the National Park Service. The house was then restored to appear as Hamilton himself knew it, guided by what little correspondence and notes they had. Due to Hamilton's unfortunately quick death and Eliza's lack of description about the home in letters, there was no guidance on how to lay out the upper floor or basement.
On May 9, 2006, the Hamilton Grange Memorial was moved, once again, to nearby St. Nicholas Park. The park was picked as it was within the boundary's of Hamilton's original estate, would recreate the pastoral setting as best as modern-day New York City could, and would allow the exterior of the home to be restored to its original state.
The Grange was lifted, in its entirety, 10 feet off the ground on special rollers, and driven slowly down the street to the park. The two-block move took six hours, with many locals following and cheering the house on. Shortly thereafter, 13 sweet gum trees were planted outside the home, as Hamilton had originally done in honor of the original 13 colonies.
The Grange reopened to the general public on September 17, 2011. A vistors center, including a historical exhibit and gift shop, now takes up the basement, while the first floor is available for guided tours. The upper floors remain unrestored and closed to the public.
"It's another evidence of the desperation the homosexual campaign has reached in its effort to put homosexual lifestyle, which is a deathstyle, across to the American people."
A lobby group called Protect America’s Children made this statement in 1978—about a doll.
That year, the release of Gay Bob, billed as the world’s first openly gay doll, caused a minor sensation. Enraged consumers complained that a toy with a homosexual backstory would lead to other "disgusting" dolls like "Priscilla the Prostitute" and "Danny the Dope Pusher." Esquire awarded Gay Bob its “Dubious Achievement Award.” And anti-gay organizations across the United States blustered.
Gay Bob, who was meant to resemble a cross between Robert Redford and Paul Newman, was blond, with a flannel shirt, tight jeans, and one pierced ear. The doll gave anti-gay organizations plenty to fear; intrinsic within it was a celebration of gay identity, evidenced by Gay Bob’s programmed speech. “Gay people,” Bob said, “are no different than straight people… if everyone came ‘out of their closets’ there wouldn’t be so many angry, frustrated, frightened people.”
In a cheeky move, the box in which Gay Bob was packaged came in the outline of a closet, so that when he left his box, he was literally coming out of the closet. Gay Bob explained: “It’s not easy to be honest about what you are — in fact it takes a great deal of courage… But remember if Gay Bob has the courage to come out his closet, so can you.”
The affirming message was no accident. The doll’s creator, Harvey Rosenberg, a former advertising executive who developed marketing campaigns for various corporations, wanted Gay Bob to “liberate” men from “traditional sexual roles.” He created the doll soon after a series of shocks rocked his life: in quick succession, his marriage fell apart and his mother became seriously ill. He decided that his next projects would need to be of great personal significance.
Though Gay Bob was certainly humorous—the doll was designed to be anatomically correct, and prominent gay activists such as Bruce Voeller told reporters that people should “deal with [the doll] lightly and enjoy it”—Rosenberg’s intentions seem to have been sincere. When asked why he would pour $10,000 of his money into the Gay Bob’s production, he replied, “we had something to learn from the gay movement, just like we did from the black civil rights movement and the women's movement, and that is having the courage to stand up and say 'I have a right to be what I am.’”
When Gay Bob hit stores in 1978, that right to be gay and equal was once again under attack, most notably from Anita Bryant, a singer and well-known brand ambassador who mobilized opposition to a Dade County, Florida ordinance that outlawed discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. Fixating on its impact on public schools, Bryant claimed that the existence of LGBT school teachers would threaten the well-being of local students. “Homosexuals will recruit our children,” she warned. “They will use money, drugs, alcohol, any means to get what they want.” In June 1977, she had the rule repealed, and her anti-gay crusade—which gained widespread media attention—sparked similar ventures in Minnesota, Oregon, Kansas, and California.
Gay Bob, which sold 2,000 copies in its first two months, appeared in the heat of these political battles. It was no real flashpoint of its own, but it served as a humorous trophy—and a sign of changing times—for those fighting against Bryant.
Initially sold through mail-order ads in gay-themed magazines, Gay Bob soon expanded into boutique stores in New York and San Francisco. Rosenberg even pitched it to major department store chains, one of which liked the idea (but ultimately did not purchase it). And, it turns out, those consumers who feared the introduction of more “disgusting” dolls were partially correct—Rosenberg soon gave Gay Bob a family of his own, with brothers Marty Macho, Executive Eddie, Anxious Al, and Straight Steve (who lived in the suburbs and wore blue suits), and sisters Fashionable Fran, Liberated Libby, and Nervous Nelly.
Many cruise ships are visible from South Korea’s eastern coast, but in the town of Jeongdongjin one vessel stands out from the rest. While most ships in the Sea of Japan hover atop the sea, the Sun Cruise Resort and Yacht stands dozens of feet higher, perched on a rocky cliff.
Believed to be the world’s first hotel designed as a cruise ship, the Sun Cruise Resort and Yacht is over 500 feet long and nearly 150 feet tall. Complete with 211 rooms, six restaurants, a sculpture garden, and a volleyball court, the giant misplaced boat sits peculiarly atop a tall cliff to give the impression that it’s run aground.
The resort is known throughout the region for its eye-catching appeal, and it takes full advantage by playing the sounds of bird calls and oceanic waves to mimic the actual experience of sailing on a cruise liner without the consequential seasickness. The boat hotel also features a rotating bar to give guests a panoramic view of Jeongdongjin’s famed sunrises.
In May of 2017, a second Sun Cruise Resort and Yacht will land ashore. Although some would say that the boat hotel idea is going a bit overboard, it seems to be successfully taking the helm in bringing the sea to the shore.
The role of Brazil in the European theatre of World War II is one of the least well known aspects of the war. This Italian cemetery is the memorial to that role.
In 1944, 25,000 soldiers of the Brazilian Expeditionary Force fought against German and Italian troops in Italy. In their final push, the Brazilians advanced as far as Turin and on May 2 they joined up with French troops at the border in Susa.
The Brazilian Military Cemetery (formerly the WWII memorial cemetery) is located in Pistoia, Tuscany, where most of the Brazilians that died in the war were originally buried.
The cemetery once contained the remains of 463 Brazilian soldiers, most of whom lost their lives in the Italian Spring Offensive in 1945. But 15 years after the war’s end, the cemetery was closed, and their remains were removed and officially re-interred in Brazil, at the new “Monumento Nacional aos Mortos da Segunda Guerra Mundial.” This current war cemetery is located on Guanabara Bay in Rio de Janeiro.
After the remains were transferred, the body of a soldier was found remaining in the cemetery. The Brazilian Government chose to leave it there and create a new Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. In 1967 the cemetery reopened with the inauguration of a new monument.
In 1961, all around America, small, cylindrical canisters were being installed at the top of Western Union telegraph poles. The canisters were colored white and topped with a Fresnel-type lens, the same refractive technology that allowed lighthouses to beam light far from its source. These lens, though, were not meant to beam energy outwards but to capture it. In the case of a nuclear attack, they would provide the first alert to the military’s nuclear commanders, signaling where the Soviet Union had hit the United States.
The “Bomb Alarm System,” designed and implemented by Western Union, wasn’t a secret, but it was unobtrusive enough that unless you were looking for it, you wouldn’t know it was there. Operational from 1961 to 1967, it was a part of the hidden infrastructure that was rapidly built to allow the U.S. military to respond to nuclear attacks—an extensive communications and monitoring system that presaged today’s networked world.
The bomb alert system depended on the unique wave shape of the thermal radiation created by a nuclear blast. As Clarence Deibert, the engineer in charge of designing the system, explained in the January 1963 Western Union Technical Review, a nuclear explosion creates energy with a shape that “distinguishes it from all natural sources of thermal radiation”—two pulses, one fast and short, the second slower and longer. The lenses that topped the alarms contained photocells that would register only that particular wave shape. Flashes of energy from a storm or other natural burst would not trigger it.
These alarms were arranged in triangles around about 100 cities and military sites in the U.S., on Greenland, and in the U.K. The three points of the triangle were far enough apart that even if one alarm was destroyed in the blast of a nuclear bomb, the other two should register the attack. At all times, each alarm was transmitting a special tone to a nearby station, via commercial telephone or telegraph lines. That tone meant the system was green—that no explosion had taken place. But if the alarm registered that specific wave of thermal radiation, it would transmit two different tones, in quick sequence, that would turn the system red.
That alert would reach military commanders on maps at central locations—the Pentagon, the North American Air Defense Command, and at Strategic Air Command, the hardened underground command center where the military’s nuclear commanders sat. The SAC headquarters, in particular, had a giant wall of maps on which they could monitor the state of the Cold War’s nuclear stand-off. The “big board,” as it was called, was 264 feet long and two stories high; originally, military aides rode in cherry-pickers to update the board, which showed everything from strike routes aimed at the USSR to military exercises taking place at that very moment. An early warning system was supposed to alert the military to approaching bombers or missiles, but the bomb alarm system would be the first signal that a nuclear weapon had hit the United States.
At the time, these networks were “the most advanced communications system ever built,” the military claimed. But it had weaknesses. Once, a single downed AT&T switch convinced military leaders the country had been attacked when they couldn’t reach major command post, as journalist Eric Schlosser writes inCommand and Control, his book on nuclear weapons and safety. In a real attack, the infrastructure that was supposed to send these type of alerts could be destroyed by strategic strikes on key network nodes.
In its drive to solve these problems, the military started laying the groundwork for the communications infrastructure of today. By the end of the 1960s, the bomb alarm system was outdated, as new satellite monitoring replaced it. And concerns about the robustness of military communications in a nuclear attack inspired RAND researcher Paul Baran to propose a network of distributed communication—an idea that evolved into the military’s revolutionary ARPANET and matured to become the internet.
In a New York City apartment, a woman was startled when she heard a loud crash in the kitchen. "I freaked out for a couple of minutes," she told the New York Daily News. When she calmed down, she went to investigate.
She heard the sound of a person panting and breathing hard in her kitchen walls.
The woman, Gjyste Margilaj, lives on the first floor of the building. The man in the walls had recently moved into the building's fourth floor. But he ended up in her apartment from the roof, from which he had climbed into an air vent that led to Margilaj's kitchen walls.
The man said getting into the vent was "the initiation for being new to the building," the New York Post reported.
The building is seven stories tall, and the man fell six stories before being stuck. He was trapped in the wall for 40 minutes before emergency responders were able extract him. They had to break the wall down. The man suffered only minor injuries.
Atlas Obscura endorses the exploration of the strange spaces in your apartment building, but be sober and be safe!
Every year at Christmas, a giant tree towers outside of Vienna's Schönbrunn Palace, impressing guests and glowing gently in the night.
And every year after Christmas, employees take the lights off the tree, chop it into pieces, and feed it to the local elephants.
This year's tree officially became a snack yesterday morning, the Local reports. The Schönbrunn Palace pachyderms shuffled out of their enclosure and began happily munching on the remains of the 18-foot spruce.
Used to punier plants, the animals seemed excited at the opportunity to eat something bigger than they are. "It is really something extraordinary for them, because it takes them quite a while to get through such a large portion," keeper Andreas Buberl said.
This is also a tradition at the Berlin Zoo in Germany, where every elephant gets five or six trees to eat. Experts say the oils in evergreen trees are good for the animals' digestion, while the bark helps clean their teeth.
In Vienna, the zoo's other residents, like rhinos and water buffalo, got smaller saplings—rejects from the annual Christmas market. It was likely the best-smelling zoo day of the year. Happy holidays, everyone.
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.
In the steppes of southwestern Russia, there lies the largest Buddhist city in all of Europe, a town called Elista. In addition to giant monasteries and Buddhist sculptures, Elista is also home to kings and queens—but not in the royal sense.
Lying on the east side of Elista is Chess City, a culturally and architecturally distinct enclave in which, as the New York Times put it, “chess is king and the people are pawns.”
Chess City was built in 1998 by chess fanatic Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, the megalomaniac leader of Russia’s Kalmykia province and president of the International Chess Federation, who claims to have been abducted by aliens with the wild, utopian mission of bringing chess to Elista.
Following the aliens' suggestion, Ilyumzhinov built Chess City just in time to host the 33rd Chess Olympiad in grand fashion. Featuring a swimming pool, a chess museum, a large open-air chess board, and a museum of Buddhist art, Chess City hosted hundreds of elite grandmasters in 1998 and was home to several smaller chess championships in later years. Also found in Chess City is a statue of Ostap Bender, a fictional literary con man obsessed with chess.
But while Chess City brought temporary international attention to Elista, it was also highly controversial. In the impoverished steppes of Elista, cutting food subsidies to fund a giant, $50 million complex for the short-term use of foreigners wasn’t a popular idea with much of the region. Once the Chess Olympiad was over, Chess City became sparsely used and largely vacated, a symbol to the people of Elista of the local government’s misguided priorities.
In the hot, smoky kitchens of 17th-century Europe, you’d find a lot of things you’d never see in kitchens today; a large open fire, an iron roasting spit, and oh—a giant hamster wheel-like contraption holding a small, live, constantly running dog.
For hundreds of years the now-extinct turnspit dog, also called Canis Vertigus (“dizzy dog”), vernepator cur, kitchen dog and turn-tyke, was specially bred just to turn a roasting mechanism for meat. And weirdly, this animal was a high-tech fixture for the professional and home cook from the 16th century until the mid-1800s.
Edward Jessy included the turnspit dog in his 19th-century book Anecdotes of Dogs, and he remembered it well from his youth. “They were long-bodied, crooked-legged, and ugly dogs, with a suspicious, unhappy look about them, as if they were weary of the task they had to do, and expected every moment to be seized upon to perform it,” he reminisced.
Turnspit dogs came in a variety of colors and were heavy-set, often with heterochromatic eyes. They were short enough to fit into a wooden wheel contraption that was connected to ropes or chains, which turned the giant turkey or ham on a spit for the master of the house.
It seems weird to bring an animal into the cooking process, let alone create a breed to fit a piece of kitchen equipment. But when the turnspit dog was first documented in the 15th century, cooks were desperate to relieve themselves of what was smoky, sweaty, tiring work. Large and royal houses in particular tended to impress guests with elaborate feasts of multiple types of game. Hunks of meat were either boiled or roasted over an open fire; the latter was not only considered most delicious, but in the UK, a hallmark of proper cooking.
Unfortunately, fire was tricky to control—you couldn’t leave, say, a goose on the flame without risking an unevenly cooked dinner. To cook meat thoroughly, kitchen staff stabbed each piece with the heavy iron spike of a roasting spit, which rotated via a looped chain and hand crank. The cook or the “spit boy” turned this contraption for long, hot hours by the flame. When an invention to ease the process materialized, every well-attended kitchen saw it as a must.
As you might imagine, turnspit dogs had a difficult lot in life as far as working dogs go. According to Stephen Coren in his book The Pawprints of History, the lucky ones “worked in pairs, with one dog trading places with its mate every couple of hours.” Dry heat radiated from toothsome foods the dog could never quite reach, and turnspit dogs weren’t necessarily supplied with water on-shift. Coren adds that for the tired pups “that were considered lazy, the cook might put a hot coal into the wheel to make the dog move its feet more quickly.”
It’s uncertain exactly what breeds of dog the turnspit came from, but it is widely believed that the Welsh Corgi and various terriers were involved. Charles Darwin pointed to turnspits as an instance of genetic engineering, and by the 1600s, the turnspit dog industry brought them into many households, taking the hardest kitchen task out of the hands of humans.
Turnspit dogs weren’t confined to the kitchen; they also drove “fruit presses, butter churns, water pumps and grain mills,” says Coren, and one hopeful inventor even drafted a patent for a dog-powered sewing machine that never quite made it to production. In the United States, where the breed was more rare, they mainly worked cider mills and hotels. When they weren’t being used as a Flintstones-style living motor, their furry little bodies were brought with their owners to church, and used as foot warmers.
Despite their treatment, turnspit dogs were by many accounts clever animals, as dogs go. In The Illustrated Natural History, John George Wood writes that turnspit dogs “were quite able to appreciate the lapse of time, and, if not relieved from their toils at the proper hour, would leap out of the wheel without orders, and force their companions to take their place, and complete their portion of the daily toil.”
Turnspit dogs were highly specialized for their main task; their heavy weight gave them the power to turn a wheel of 30 pounds or more, and they were bred with the compulsion to move continuously. John Caius, who wrote Of Englishe Dogges in the 1500s, wrote that turnspit dogs “so diligently look to their business that no drudge nor scullion can do the feat more cunningly.”
If you’re getting ideas about fashioning your own dog-sized wheel, though, it’s unlikely to be as effective. Lucy Worsley, chief curator at the Historic Royal Palaces in London and food historian Ivan Day attempted to coax a dog named Coco to power the spit roast at the George Inn on the BBC series History of the Home, to no avail. These dogs were wildly popular despite some predictable drawbacks; Worsley cites that one 18th-century turnspit owner complained of their dog “getting in the way of the fire” and “doing his business all over the kitchen.”
Some humans loved their turnspit dogs; Queen Victoria kept three as housepets, rather than kitchen tools. Some wrote narratives about them; an 1864 poem review from The Book of Daysdescribes a turnspit dog called Fuddle who is so angry at his servitude he complains to his brethren about the evil cook over a pile of savory, hard-earned bones. The “stood in awe of whip and bell;” but when the cook enters the room and pets her dogs, Fuddle has a change of heart:
He licked his lips, and wagged his tail, Was overjoyed he should prevail Such favour to obtain. Among the rest he went to play, Was put into the wheel next day, He turned and ate as well as they, And never speeched again.
The short, chubby, depressed cooking dog couldn’t escape her task for hundreds of years, but by the turn of the 20th century, animal rights activist groups made people question the decision to use a living, suffering dog as a kitchen gadget in the home. According to food historian William Woys Weaver, the treatment of Turnspit Dogs in an 1850s Manhattan hotel so angered activist Henry Berg that it inspired him to found the ASPCA.
In Dogs, H.D. Richardson writes that “Fortunately for humanity, mechanical contrivances have, in these countries at least, superseded the necessity of thus torturing a poor dog.” The clock jack, a weighted pulley that turned meat automatically, became the new high-tech spit-turning tool of choice, and as gas ranges overshadowed the open-fire cooking method completely, the Turnspit Dog drifted fully out of use and breeding programs.
Genetics don’t disappear that quickly, of course; Richardson also noted that a Welsh dog called the “bowsy terrier” resembled a possible terrier/turnspit dog mix, so there might be some turnspit dog-descended canines out there yet. These days, however, the last pure turnspit dog, still fluffy and brown, currently rests in well-earned peace at Abergavenny Museum in Wales, as a taxidermy exhibit.
In 1964, the Jarbidge Wilderness became the first ever wilderness area in the state of Nevada, growing to encompass more than 113,000 acres of pristine terrain. Dotted throughout the wilderness area are elk, moose, mountain lions, cold deserts, alpine forests, wildflowers, and tree carvings made by Basque sheepherders in the mid-1800s. But if you dig deeper, you'll find something even more enthralling: a strange mythological backstory of a man-eating giant who roamed across the Jarbidge Wilderness for ages.
The Jarbidge Wilderness gets its name from Tsawhawbitts, the Shoshone word for “a weird beastly creature.” Tsawhawbitts was well known among local tribes to be a cannibalistic, man-eating giant who would capture local Shoshones, pile them into a basket, and carry them away for supper.
One day, after years of avoiding Tsawhawbitts at all costs, the vengeful Shoshone tribe decided that enough was enough and attempted to trap the giant once and for all. In an epic battle, the Shoshone backed Tsawhawbitts into what is now known as Jarbidge Canyon and used rocks and boulders to trap it in a cave for the rest of its life.
Little occurred in the region until 1909, when prospector Dave Bourne struck gold in Jarbidge Canyon in what's known as the "last great American gold rush." After learning of the strange legend of Tsawhawbitts, Bourne decided to name the surrounding area after the cannibalistic monster. Unfortunately, Bourne misheard the name and mistook Tsawhawbitts for “Jahabich,” which later became simplified to Jarbidge, which remains the name of the wilderness area to this day.
The town of Jarbidge itself still stands to this day, featuring remnants of the Wild West gold mining town it once was. Inside Jarbidge is a trading post, gas pump, hotel, saloon, and the Jarbidge Jail, which once held Ben Kuhl, the man who committed the last stagecoach robbery in the American West. Kohl was convicted after analyzing the blood on the stagecoach, the first use of fingerprinting technology to catch a culprit in American history.
Nowadays, the Jarbidge Wilderness remains one of the most remote, serene, and least polluted natural areas in the country. Every visit will be delightful, so long as you steer clear of Jarbidge Canyon, where Tsawhawbitts may still be lurking around.
Artist Movana Chen spends much of her time next to a large ball of tangled strings of paper. The pages of old books, magazines, diaries, and maps become woven sculptures and dresses—the shreds of paper are Chen's string for knitting.
Since 2003, the Hong Kong-based artist has been weaving shredded paper to create a variety of knitted art pieces, from a 50-foot-long carpet to mummy-like bodysuits. In this video produced by South China Morning Post, Chen shows her 2013 exhibition KNITerature at ArtisTree Gallery in Hong Kong. At the 33-second mark, you can see her busy fingers working traditional needles to weave the threads of paper together.
"Knitting paper is very different from knitting wool yarn," Chen says in the video. "You just need one string when knitting wool, but you need several strings when knitting paper. So it takes a lot of time."
She was first inspired to knit with paper after being assigned the long, laborious duty of shredding confidential documents as an accountant. Chen still uses the original shredder from her accounting days to create the material she needs for her pieces.
Chen initially focused on clothing, her debut paper knitted garment a dress comprised of discarded magazines (a durable paper to work with, according to Chen). Later, she moved onto full suit sculptures, or "body containers," which she wore around Hong Kong in a 2013 performance art piece. The suit, seen at the 1:15-mark, was knitted with shredded traveling maps. In 2007, she and a colleague wore body containers linked at the head and moved about the busy streets of Seoul. The performance of coordination and communication was meant to symbolize the relationship between North and South Korea, reported the South China Morning Post.
The 50-foot-long paper knitted piece titled Knitting Conversations and her body containers were displayed in the KNITerature exhibition. Knitting Conversations involved the work of 150 knitters around the world who contributed personal books of sentimental value. According to her website, the project is ongoing. Chen hopes to collect more than 10,000 knitted paper pieces from people around the world.
"People think I'm destroying history by shredding," Chen tellsSouth China Morning Post. "But I don't think so. I'm transforming it to another way of communicating … and I let people become closer through the project."
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.
St Mark's Basilica in Venice is the city's most famous and likely most crowded church, an excellent example of Italo-Byzantine architecture. It is not, however, Venice's most attractive or most interesting church on the interior, compared with some of the later Renaissance and Baroque styles.
What is truly lovely and unusual at St Mark's, however, is the treasury—particularly the half of the treasury featuring dozens of gold and crystal reliquaries containing the bones of saints, all arranged in orderly rows and carefully labelled as if in some demented science museum.
The treasury is a pleasant break from the cattle call of tourists doing a quick loop through the main nave, and is well worth the extra five euros to get in.
Little green men stand ready to invade the west shore of Roosevelt Island in New York City. Well, not men so much as a coin and a house. And not invade so much as symbolize the struggle of wealth inequality in the city.
The artistic commentary is appropriately called "The Marriage of Money and Real Estate." It consists of three bronze sculptures: one of a coin being attacked by what seems to be an anthropomorphized moneybag coming out of the mouth of a man in a top hat, one of a house in a skirt being attacked by a lobster with a dollar sign on its face, and one of the house and coin joined in a happy marriage.
The piece was created by Brooklyn-based artist Tom Otterness, who specializes in public art, and tends to feature such adorable figures in his sculptural work. The figures poke up out of the East River near the Octagon Field, just south of The Prow, across the river from Manhattan’s John Jay Park between East 76th and East 78th Streets. Depending on the tide, the figures attacking the main characters may or may not be visible above the water.
Though Owosso, Michigan contains some of the most luxurious historic homes found throughout the Midwest, one stands out from the rest. Curwood Castle was built in 1923, but the yellow chateau looks straight out of a romantic Norman fairytale.
Author James Oliver had the magnificent castle constructed in his hometown, and selected the flagstones adorning its exterior himself. He penned his action-adventure novels from the highest turret overlooking the Shiawassee River. The wooded surroundings not only served as setting for his stories, but also encouraged his environmental conservation advocacy.
Curwood only lived in his castle for five years before his death in 1927. The building now serves as a museum and the surrounding land as a park.
There is an underground public bathroom in Düsseldorf's city center that went unused, unloved, and for ten years, nearly unnoticed. It took a scrappy band of local artists to see its potential, taking on the abandoned space to create a community art and performance venue called “Reinraum.”
The entrance is tucked away between neighborhood shops, hotels and burger joints, down a nondescript flight of stairs. Framed by bright green walls, the concrete steps lead to 645 square feet of subterranean galleries lined in subway tile and old urinals.
Since 2002, Reinraum has used the unexpected space to further the cause of providing art for the public sphere. Acting as a collective, the 45 members provide their time and effort to support Düsseldorf's diverse cultural landscape, organizing distinctive and disparate art exhibits, live music and themed events year-round.
Ironically, the name Reinraum means “clean room,” as you’d expect to see at a microelectronic plant or medical lab. According to the group, it’s meant to suggest the purest possible conditions for artists to create. Sometimes the clean room just happens to be an old underground bathroom.
