Sure, you know about Glenwood Hot Springs Pool, but that's for tourists and takes a lot of pennies. The Penny Hot Springs 30 minutes south is for those in the know, and is absolutely free.
The Penny Hot Springs are located below the large granite cliffs named "Hell's Gates." They were named for hotelier Dan Penny, who set up a hotel and bathhouse and made good use of the springs. The cultural revolution of the 1960s brought less modesty, and visitors started to enjoy the springs au naturale.
Unfortunately, locals were not pleased with this, and essentially shut the bathhouse down. About 20 years ago, the county purchased the property and restored the pools. Today the natural, non-commercialized setting is peaceful and makes you feel like you're in on a secret.
The white hot spring water mixes with the frigid Crystal River and creates varied temperature pools, depending on how much river water is allowed into the rock pools. The water can be deceptively hot—it will scald and you cannot tell if the stream running into the river is cold or hot by sight, so step over until you know for sure.
"The Naked Ladies" are a group of unusually posed statues, comprised of eight sea nymphs carved from white Carrara marble atop a rock garden. One naked lady stands atop two horses, while her companions stretch their arms upwards toward her. One offers up a pearl. They are all beautiful, sculpted in a fin de siècle, Pre-Raphaelite inspired style. But because of the strange circumstances by which the ladies came to reside here, their creator's identity is lost to the ages.
Located in a public garden by York House, the statues were originally the property of Whitaker Wright, an infamous fraud artist who committed suicide in 1904 by cyanide capsule after his conviction. After Wright's death, his property was removed and auctioned from Witley Park, including the statues. They were moved to York House in 1906, where they were the backdrop for numerous society parties hosted by Sir Ratan Tata. It was during this time period that they earned their plainly descriptive name.
The statues were removed without any notes taken on their original arrangement, so the designers of the York House garden merely guessed at where the Oceanids should go. There is some suggestion that one or two of the figures came from another statuary entirely, and does not belong on the fountain. When they arrived they were worn from 20 years of neglect and vandalism, but a restoration project returned them to their former marbled glory.
In 1924 the grounds became the property of the Twickenham Council, who opened them as a public park. Visitors were shocked and intrigued by the mysterious Oceanids in the fountain. Allegedly during the Blitz of World War II, the moonlight's reflection on the white marble provided a convenient landmark for bomber planes flying above. When London enacted blackouts, the statues were covered in gray sludge to dull their pearly sheen.
For years, Abul Bajandar had massive growths on his hands, which were actually warts, but looked like branches from a tree. This led to Bajandar being dubbed "Tree Man," in addition to a lot of misery.
The extremely rare disease, known as epidermodysplasia verruciformis, is a skin disorder that can result in the growth of macules and papules, or swelling and discolorations that grow bigger over time. Bajandar, a father, couldn't pick up his daughter, eat by himself, or work. (He was a rickshaw driver before the condition began to take hold.)
But last week, doctors in Dhaka, Bangladesh said that after "at least" 16 operations, they had fixed Bajandar's hands, and perhaps permanently cured him.
“I never thought I would ever be able to hold my kid with my hands,” Bajandar told Agence France-Presse. “Now I feel so much better. I can hold my daughter in my lap and play with her. I can’t wait to go back home.”
Bajandar, 27, is expected to be released from the hospital in the next 30 days, and, he says, will start a business with the donations he's received since his sickness made international headlines last year.
In the meantime, his wife and daughter remain with him at Dhaka Medical College and Hospital, where he's optimistic he can return to normal life.
"I hope the curse won't return again," he told AFP.
Nearly 30 years before Helena Rubenstein and Elizabeth Arden launched their beauty brands, a former servant girl from Canada created the American hair salon industry, designed the first reclining salon chair, and went on to establish retail franchising as we know it today. Along the way she empowered thousands of young women and amassed a fortune.
Martha Matilda Harper was born in 1857 into a working class family in Ontario, Canada. At the age of seven, her father bound her out in servitude to an uncle, and she was sent 60 miles from home to begin a life of drudgery. Eventually, she went to work for a German holistic doctor, who taught her his revolutionary ideas about hair care. Harper learned about stimulating blood flow to the scalp through vigorous hair brushing, and the importance of hygiene; all new ideas at the time. She embraced the doctor’s practices and her own hair flourished. Before he died in 1881, the doctor gave Harper his secret hair tonic formula, little knowing the effects his small bequeath would have on Harper and American society.
The next year Harper immigrated to Rochester, New York, once again as a servant, but she had the tonic and a plan.
“At the end of the 19th century, Rochester was a hot bed of innovation. If you were slightly weird you fit in, so it was the perfect community for someone who was daring to introduce a new concept,” says Jane Plitt, author of Martha Matilda Harper and the American Dream: How One Woman Changed the Face of Modern Business.
Soon Harper was delighting her new employer, Luella Roberts, and Roberts’ affluent friends with her hair skills and secret tonic (an organic shampoo). During the Victorian era, people either didn’t wash their hair, or used harsh soaps. Women had their hair done at home by servants, or independent hairdressers, but Harper had the revolutionary idea of opening a public hair salon for women.
In the midst of planning her new venture, Harper got very ill, and was nursed back to health by a Christian Science healer. The experience turned her into a lifelong Christian Scientist, and the church’s teachings and organization would have a profound effect on Harper’s business.
In 1888 Harper used her life savings of $360 to open her first salon. That same year, George Eastman launched Kodak in Rochester with $1 million in venture capital. Convincing women to have their hair done in public would be a tough sell, so Harper chose the location of her salon strategically. She used connections through Roberts to secure space in the prominent Powers Building in downtown Rochester, and placed a large photograph of herself showcasing her floor-length hair on the door.
The customers did not come, so Harper employed a brilliant marketing tactic. Next door to her fledgling salon was a children’s music school, which lacked a waiting room. Every day well-heeled mothers would bring their children to class, only to be left standing in the hall. Harper invited the women to rest in her salon, and lured them into trying her services; what would become known as the Harper Method.
After nearly a quarter century in servitude, Harper knew how to pamper her clientele. She designed the first reclining chair so they could have their hair washed without getting shampoo in their eyes, and had a half circle cut out of her sink (with running water) for ladies to rest their heads. The emphasis was on customer service, long before the term was coined. Once women experienced the Harper Method, they were converts.
Her clients were made up of an unlikely blend of society ladies and suffragists, whose movement was spearheaded in Rochester. Soon Harper was catering to both circles, and women in each sphere were spreading the word about the new salon. Susan B. Anthony was a friend and client.
“What was significant was it was a combination of the hoi polloi ladies who came as customers along with the suffragettes who helped network the business,” says Plitt. “Alexander Graham Bell’s wife Mabel became a client, and she brought Grace Coolidge, the future First Lady, and Grace brought [socialite and social activist] Bertha Honoré Palmer. It was women’s networking at its best.”
Palmer became such a fan that she insisted Harper open a shop in her native Chicago in time for the world’s fair of 1893. Harper shrewdly replied that Palmer needed to get a commitment from twenty-five women to patronize a Chicago shop.
With the commitment secured, Harper had to figure out how to expand her business with her limited resources. According to Plitt, she looked to the Christian Science Church for guidance. Under the strict direction of founder Mary Baker Eddy, the church maintained satellite operations throughout the country. Harper decided this was the model she would replicate.
She also incorporated the goal of the suffragists to empower women. In particular, Susan B. Anthony advocated women having financial independence in an era when women had very few rights, least of all financial.
“She used the model to enable other poor servant girls and factory girls to transform their lives,” Plitt says.
By dictating that poor women would open the first 100 salons, in one fell swoop Harper became a pioneer of social entrepreneurship and modern franchising. (The word franchising comes from the French, and literally means “to free from servitude”.) Ray Kroc of McDonald’s is widely credited with being the father of American franchising, but Harper beat him to it by 60 years.
The first two franchises were opened in 1891 in Buffalo and Detroit. Franchisees had to purchase Harper’s chair and sink (which she unfortunately did not patent) and all of her products. Because the women—who became known as “Harperites”—usually lacked the funds for the upfront costs, Harper loaned them the money to buy the franchise.
In 1893 Harper opened her Chicago salon in time for the fair, and she continued to expand; eventually having over five hundred shops globally, including one in each of the fifty states, a network of beauty schools training women in the Harper Method, and a factory in Rochester to manufacture her organic products. As her empire grew, the rich and famous flocked to her shops.
Harper’s loyal clients included members of the British royal family, the German Kaiser, the actress Helen Hayes, and Rose and Joseph Kennedy (and later, Jacqueline Kennedy and Lady-Bird Johnson). While negotiating the Treaty of Versailles, President Woodrow Wilson traveled to Paris nightly to the Harper salon to have his scalp massaged. Hair treatments for men—including massage—were a novelty, and one of Harper’s many innovations.
Sally Knapp, 81, is one woman whose life was changed by Harper. She entered Harper’s beauty school in Rochester right out of high school.
“I was a Harper girl, and graduated in 1954,” Knapp says. “At the time beauty schools did not have the best reputation. They seemed dirty to me, and Harper was different, the approach was different. It was on hair care rather than simply coiffing.”
In 1957, Knapp took over a Harper salon in Baltimore, and ran the business for 50 years.
“She gave me my career and I think she gave me some principles of how you treat people. The idea of caring for people came from my training, and that definitely came from Martha,” Knapp says.
Harper never lost sight of her original goal of empowering women. Her salons offered childcare and were open in the evening to accommodate busy women’s schedules. Unlike John Rockefeller, who lived in a fortress, Harper’s Rochester mansion was open to all “Harperites” when they came to town.
She refused to marry until she was fully in control of her empire, and at the age of 63 married Robert MacBain, who was 39.
She stepped down as CEO in 1932 and MacBain took over. He began to transform the company, introducing chemical dyes and permanents (which were forbidden under Harper, who strictly used natural products) and the female “esprit de corps” was gone, according to Plitt. Harper died in 1950 at the age of 92, and by the time MacBain sold the company in the 1970s, it was a shadow of its former self. The last Harper salon closed in Rochester in 2005.
The woman who transformed the lives of so many, and changed the face of American business never got her due in life. While the remaining “Harperites” are fiercely loyal, Harper’s is a name largely forgotten.
“She’s important as a national business figure,” says Sarah LeCount, Collections Manager at the Rochester Museum & Science Center, which has a large collection of Harper artifacts, including two of her shampoo chairs.
“She really felt that by developing her salon system she was helping women establish a financial life of their own beyond their husband’s, or allowed them to live without a husband.”
In 2001 Harper was posthumously honored with an award from the International Franchising Association; and was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame in 2003.
“She is lost in history and I think it’s too bad,” says Knapp. “It happens and makes you wonder about your worth sometimes in life. Martha stood for a lot of things and it’s a shame that it’s been lost in the history pages.”
In 1923, the year after the founding of the Soviet Union, the Lomonosov Porcelain Factory in Petrograd (now St. Petersburg) produced a unique chess set. Since originating in sixth-century India, chess designs had been inspired by military battles, royalty, even nature; now, the inspiration was ideology.
The chess set produced in Lomonosov had two very distinct sides. For the pieces in white, the king is a skeleton, wielding a femur bone as a scepter. The queen unashamedly displays an abundance of riches. The bishops are the tsar's imperial guards, and the pawns are bound in chains. These are the pieces for the capitalist side.
The communist side—in red, naturally—is led by the king, who is a blacksmith, and queen, who carries wheat. The pawns are female farm workers and the bishops, red army colonels. The message wasn’t subtle, but it was evidently popular: the Communist Propaganda Set became one of the most copied in the world.
This extraordinary set is just one example of the designs featured in Master Works: Rare and Beautiful Chess Sets. As the book shows, even with the apparent limitations of structure—32 pieces across 64 squares—there is capacity for unusual and inspired design.
Some designs, as with the Communist Propaganda set, arose from ideology. Some were born out of wealth, such as the opulent rock crystal and silver set from 16th-century France. And some were made from necessity, such as the cardboard pieces created during the 900-day siege of Leningrad in World War II.
AO has images of these unusual designs, and more, from Master Works.
Sid Saunders, 73, was walking through Marline Wood, in East Sussex, England, when he come upon a “bit of concrete just poking out of the undergrowth,” as he told the Hastings Observer. He found the concrete was wedged well into the ground and started clearing the area of undergrowth. There, buried for years, was a tiny headstone, no higher than his calf.
The stone was overgrown with moss, but when Saunders cleaned it off, he could read its inscription:
In Memory of the Little 🐇 Duchie Born August 1869 Died December 1882
(There really is a small image of a bunny dug into the stone.)
Duchie lived 13 years, a long life for a rabbit but within the realm of possibility for a well-loved pet. The rabbit’s name, Saunders thinks, indicates that it’s part of the Dutch rabbit family. Because the Duchie lived so long and got a bespoke headstone, it’s likely he or she was the pet of a well-off family.
In the former Yugoslavia, under the "Benevolent Dictator" Josip Tito, a number of monuments, or "spomeniki," were constructed in the late '60s and early '70s. They are futuristic, brutalist, and tell the stories of Balkan conflict.
The purpose of the monuments was manifold. First, their blocky, concrete construction was meant to signify the resilience of Yugoslavian communism. The futuristic style of the spomeniki symbolized forward facing optimism for the nation. Individually, the gigantic statues commemorated an event in Yugoslavian history, perhaps a victory in battle or a tragic massacre.
The monument on Grmeč Mountain is completely abandoned. Moss grows in its cracks, and the only way to find it is by wandering through the forest, as no signs point the way. The name of the architect is lost to history, as is the exact revolution the rotund spomenik is meant to commemorate.
The famous livestock market just outside of China's westernmost city has met every Sunday for thousands of years. A crucial hub on the Silk Road, Kashgar has served as an oasis and trading post between China, the Middle East and Europe for ages.
The bazaar is open every day of the week for handicrafts, clothes, food, etc., but it's on Sundays that things really get going. That's when local farmers, mostly of Uighur descent, gather to buy and sell livestock including sheep, goats, camels and horses.
The market competes with other local markets and even ones further out, like the one in Hotan, but the Kashgar Market is by far the largest and most popular. This has been true since ancient days. In BC 128 an envoy of Emperor Wudi reported seeing a bustling market in the West with people from all over selling their wares.
Kashgar remains one of the best examples of Islamic China. Its influences from the Middle East are present at the market, as are those from Tibet, Mongolia, and Turkey. You can find a little piece of each of these at the Kashgar Bazaar–for a price, of course.
The most notable grave in San Jose's Hacienda Cemetery is not that of an entire person, but his limb. Specifically, the left arm of a man named Richard Bertram Barrett. While Barrett's left arm was buried here in 1898, the rest of him lived another 61 years and was buried elsewhere.
In 1898, when Bert Barrett was 13 years old, a shotgun blew off almost half of his left arm in a terrible hunting accident. In compliance with the laws of the time, he buried his severed appendage. The marker reads simply: “His arm lies here. May it rest in peace.” The rest of Bertram’s body is buried 11 miles away at Oak Hill Memorial Park, and his story is the source of local campfire tales.
After his amputated limb was interred at Hacienda Cemetery, the rest of Richard Bertram Barrett went on to live a very successful life. He went on to become the Chief of Sanitation for the Santa Clara County Health Department, and the road that bisects the cemetery in which his arm is buried is named for him. In 1959, he passed away at the ripe old age of 74. Though the man rests in peace, local legend tells that Bertram’s left arm comes alive on Halloween night to seek out the rest of him, buried eleven miles away from the verdant pioneer cemetery.
Hacienda Cemetery is situated in the historic San Jose community of New Almaden, located at the southern tip of the urban sprawl that today is Silicon Valley. While this community is part of present-day San Jose, it was once a bustling mining town in one of the wildest parts of the Wild West, where bandits, mountain lions, wildfire, and the constant dangers of mercury mining were typical of the area.
Hacienda holds the mortal remains of the New Almaden Quicksilver miners and their families who lived nearby from the 1850s to the 1920s. At one time, Almaden Quicksilver was the largest mercury mine in the world. Around 50 graves, both marked and unmarked, speck the wooded landscape. Many grave sites are marked with graying white picket fences.
When a neighborhood changes, the food options do, too. Hole-in-the-wall joints become, say, avocado-toast emporiums. Whole bodegas go organic.
Right now, no one knows that better than the hairy-legged vampire bat. New research from Brazil shows that the species, which once relied exclusively on bird blood, has incorporated a new food source: people.
Researchers from the Federal University of Pernambuco tested feces from a hairy-legged colony in northeast Brazil, and found human blood, New Scientist reports. "We were quite surprised," the lead researcher told the outlet. In the past, the bats have been quite picky, choosing to abstain from food rather than drink mammal blood.
But as humans move into the forest, and more feathery snacks are driven out, the bats are apparently changing their palates. The researchers also found chicken blood in the samples, showing that the bats were likely visiting local farms for dinner.
This is more than just freaky—a bat bite can transfer parasites or infectious diseases, and garlic and silver bullets aren't much help. Researchers are currently following up with nearby residents to assess the frequency and timing of the bites.
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.
The small town of Chechersk is isolated on all sides because it sits within the area contaminated by fallout from the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. Nevertheless, right in the middle of town there is one peculiar attraction: a midcentury Soviet airplane. Permanently parked just off the main road down the street from the town hall, even some locals ask themselves how the aircraft ʻʻlanded” here.
During Belarus' Soviet days it was common to put large machinery on literal pedestals after they were retired, as a testament to Communist industry. You can find trucks, cars, tanks, concrete mixers and littered across Belarusian cities, but few are as striking as the Chechersk airplane.
It is a Soviet Tupolev Tu-124, a sibling of the Tu-104, the world's first successful jet airliner. These planes flew the skies between 1962 and 1980. They seated 56 passengers and were equipped with parachutes to be used in an emergency landing. Before it was decommissioned the the plane was used by the Soviet Union Ministry of Defence. Afterward, it mysteriously ended up as a ʻʻmonument” in Chachersk. The nearest airport is about 100 kilometers away.
When it first arrived the airplane was used as a movie theater. Nowadays it is used as a local culture centre for exhibitions and education of handicrafts, for instance, knitting.
Last year Tabetha Boyajian, an astronomer now working at Louisiana State University, published a paper about a star that had something strange blocking its light. The Kepler telescope had captured the star’s light in a pattern of flux that had no obvious explanation; Boyajian looked for one until she convinced herself that the star was “truly something that is unique,” she told Atlas Obscura.
The flux indicated that something unusual was circling the star, but what could it be? The most dramatic explanation was that it might be an alien megastructure: if we were to detect an alien megastructure, it probably wouldn’t be a spherical object, and whatever was orbiting this star wasn’t spherical.
Even the scientists who proposed this possibility didn’t think it was likely, though. “It is probably something natural that we just haven’t thought of yet,” Boyajian said.
Now, a team of scientists from Columbia and UC Berkeley have released a paper detailing one such hypothesis: the strange behavior of the star’s light is due to the “inspiral of a planetary body or bodies.” In this theory, the star sucked up a planet at some point, which would have made it quickly brighten, and the flux in the light is the part of the after-effect, as the star returns to its more normal state. The flux could also be due in part to fragments of that planet—or from its former moons.
This theory has been raised before, but this paper details it out more convincingly. The astronomers who floated the possibility of an alien megastructure also considered this possibility, and one of them, Jason Wright, now writes that this new analysis shows that “the hypothesis may be plausible after all” (although he adds plenty of caveats to that assessment).
That doesn’t mean it’s the explanation, though. "Its a great new shake down on the plausibility of a circumstellar source (and a recently devoured one) doing the damage in our star," Boyajian writes in a email. Other natural phenomenon are still in the running and, until there’s broad agreement on what exactly is happening here, there's always the unlikely chance that the culprit could be an alien megastructure after all.
These stone walls by the Washington Monument aren’t a part of any memorial or historic structure. They’re part of a temporary dam that can span 17th Street and hold back a 100-year flood. The dam is the newest part of the 80-year-old Potomac Park levee.
Washington's Federal Triangle neighborhood is uniquely vulnerable to flooding. First, the area is built on low lying land; if the river crests East Potomac Park it would quickly rush downhill and inundate the cross streets off Constitution Avenue. The second threat comes from rain runoff; Federal Triangle is the lowest point in a drainage basin stretching from the ballpark to Fort Totten.
The stakes are even higher because of what’s in those Federal Triangle buildings. Flood damage to the National Archives, EPA, IRS and Department of Justice could be devastating.
The original Potomac Park Levee was a temporary structure built during a flood in 1936 to keep rising waters from reaching downtown. That weather event spurred Congress to authorize the construction of a larger earthen barrier and make the levee permanent. The Army Corps of Engineers completed the project in 1939. Most people walking along the sloping footpaths around the tidal basin don't realize that they're standing on manmade berms that were carefully laid out to prevent a watery disaster.
17th Street was the only gap in the levee—a deliberate but foolish engineering decision. The gap provided a pleasant even grade for automobile drivers traveling north to south, and it centralized the risk of a flood, so during a storm engineers could focus their efforts on a single preplanned fail-safe rather than fighting the waters at a thousand different locations along the levee.
In the event of flood conditions, the plan called for a hastily built sandbag wall to plug the gap. Unfortunately, in the case of the floods of 1937, 1942, 1972, and 2006, that wasn’t good enough.
Washington finally moved to address the issue with construction of the present-day stone and cement structure. The gap in the center can be filled in with posts and panels that are capable of holding back waters up to 19 feet above sea level. They’re stored ready to go on trucks in Bladensburg and can be assembled in a few hours. The crews practice once a year to keep up their readiness and check the equipment.
Wellington, New Zealand is considered to be the windiest city on the planet. This is good for the local wind turbines and dramatic hair-blowing photoshoots, but not so great for passengers aboard planes landing at Wellington International Airport. On days when a gale is blowing, aircraft tilt and sway as they descend to the runway, occasionally having to abort the landing at the last moment.
In May 2016, an Air New Zealand flight experienced “massive lifts and drops, ups and downs, with a lot of banging and crashing and lots of squealing,” passenger Carl-Ann Herbert told the New Zealand Herald. It was a similar story a few months earlier, when another Air New Zealand flight, according to passenger Eleni Kanelos, "moved side to side, then it just dropped and there were a few screams."
The video above shows some of the more hairy descents at Wellington airport, including two in which the pilots had to abandon their landing plans at the last second and head back into the sky for another go-around.
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.
The Underground Boxing Gym in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, has all the usual accoutrements of a traditional fighters’ gathering place: a ring, some heavy bags, dumbbells, mirrors, pull-up bars, and old fight posters. But to enter this place on a typical weekday evening is to discover a scene slightly out of step with the usual image of pugilistic education: gathered across the length of the gym is a troop of children—as young as five and as old as 15—diligently attending to their calisthenics. Later, they’ll don headgear and oversized gloves and proceed, in pairs, to duke it out in the ring.
Despite its name, the Underground Boxing Gym occupies the entire third floor of a commercial building just off of the B/Q subway station in Sheepshead Bay. In a canny bit of advertising, the gym’s logo — a billboard-sized poster of a hulking bear with boxing gloves lifted to its muzzle — can be seen overlooking the elevated subway platform.
Sheepshead Bay, along with neighboring Brighton Beach, is home to one of the largest Russian-speaking communities in the United States, an enclave growing denser each year. The bear, a centuries-old Russian symbol, is a fitting masthead for a locale where a cup of borscht is found without Yelp.
From the doorway of the gym, two tykes can be seen crawling through the ropes of the ring, their slightly bemused parents watching from the benches. Victoria Irlinksy, the mother of Alan, a six-year-old newcomer to the gym, sees boxing as an occasion for her son to grapple with real-world responsibility. “[Boxing] teaches them the basic principles of self-defense and discipline,” said Irlinksy. “They’re boys. They need to get their energy out somewhere and this is the best place for them.”
For Igor Rabinsky, whose son Lenny, 10, has had more than a few run-ins with bullies at school, the gym has instilled his son with the kind of confidence that makes him less likely to be picked on. “Lenny’s character has totally changed,” he says. “He is sure of himself. The [bullies] see that and think twice now.”
Boxing as a social crusading tool has been well-documented. It took a troubled Mike Tyson (who, admittedly, would stay troubled throughout his career) out of the streets of Brownsville and made him the heavyweight champion of the world. But as the gym’s founder and sole trainer Ilia Mesishchev makes clear, his ambitions for his fighters are measured on a much more moderate—but no less important—scale—human decency.
“People have to be polite to each other,” Mesishchev says. “The kids learn it here. Boxing isn’t about aggressive attitudes. It’s about human beings recognizing other human beings. If you don’t respect the other guy in the ring, you don’t respect yourself.”
Still, the bad reputation persists. In addition to being reduced to a sport that has scant mainstream appeal, boxing’s inherent violence carries with it a stigma that middle-class America won’t likely embrace anytime soon. Irlinsky, though, scoffed at the suggestion that boxing was more dangerous than other sports. “In hockey, half of those players don’t have their teeth!” Irlinksy countered. “And don’t get me started with football…those kids have concussions by the time they are twenty. Here, the kids wear all the safety gear and everything is controlled by the trainer.”
Then she reframed the question. “What sport isn’t violent?”
If the usual American conventions seem obscured in the Underground Boxing Gym, it’s probably because the gym’s ethos is derived from more hardscrabble origins.
The neighborhood’s heritage is emblazoned on the walls of the Underground Boxing Gym, which is lined with flags that recall the 15 constituent republics of the Soviet Union. No, this isn’t a bastion of ex-Soviet tribalism (politics, much less Putin, have no place here). Nevertheless, the gym’s cultural roots and the ubiquity of Russian makes it an intuitive and accessible extension of the larger Sheepshead Bay community. “It’s like a home for many of the people who come here,” Mesishchev noted. “They feel comfortable here.”
To compare the Underground Boxing Gym solely to a kindergarten would be to overlook the gym’s broader client base, which includes two undefeated prizefighters, Golden Glove amateurs, and a mix of high school students and 9-to-5ers. The kicker? Everyone trains together. Most boxing gyms, like weight rooms, are a free agent’s paradise that operates on an open schedule, allowing the client to conduct their own workout. The reverse is true for The Underground Boxing Gym, where the neophytes learn by training alongside seasoned boxers, and where, as Mesishchev puts it, the dedicated separate themselves from the flakes. The democratic conditions are what make it possible for Artom Oryschenko, a diminutive but highly-skilled 12-year-old Ukrainian, to lead a pack of adults and tots alike through the warm ups—all under, of course, Mesishchev’s dutiful direction and workgroup philosophy that is less newfangled than you might think.
A forty-something expat from Belarus who had success in the amateur ranks on the Israeli National team before diving into coaching full time, Mesishchev is a proponent of what is colloquially referred to, in some circles, as the Soviet Style of boxing, a reference to Russia’s stellar amateur boxing program when the Iron Curtain was still up. For newcomers who are serious about amateur boxing, Mesishchev will turn them on to a grainy YouTube video of a certain Russian boxing squad undergoing various plyometric and shadowboxing drills together. “Don’t tell anyone about this,” Mesishchev cautioned, as though he were safeguarding a secret formula. More than anything else, Mesishchev maintains, the Soviet Style upholds a generous, collaborative spirit based on fine-tuning the fundamentals.
If you’re just looking to hit the heavy bag for a few rounds and twiddle around with the speed bag, the Underground Boxing Gym is probably not for you. Scarcely can you get away with throwing a flimsy jab before Mesishchev—or, say, his top professional, Constantin Bejenaru, an undefeated cruiserweight from Moldova—reprimands you. Boxing, in one of its few positive epithets, is often referred to as “Sweet Science” to describe the strategic, calculated moves a fighter makes inside the ring. It’s a sentiment that underscores the pedagogical nature of the Underground Boxing Gym.
But if it sounds as though the gym peddles in anachronism, there are current developments on the professional level that legitimate Mesishchev’s ex-Soviet thinking. In recent years, boxing has seen a wave of fighters from Eastern Europe fill its ranks. Bona fide knockout artists like Gennady Golovkin (Kazakhstan) and Sergey Kovalev (Russia) have earned not only the admiration of the most dedicated fight fans but have also begun to catch the attention of the casual observer. There is also Vasyl Lomachenko (Ukraine), a two-time gold medalist and current champion in the 130-pound division, who some believe might be the most talented fighter in the world. Mesishchev is proud to be associated with this new demographic but demurred when asked if he sees this as marketing potential for his gym. “I don’t want to use their names for commercial purposes,” he said, adding that tending to his stable of fighters is more than enough.
“We’re one big family here,” Mesishchev says, as he unlaces the gloves of one his fighters. “We don’t have good guys or bad guys. Yes, some are better than others but what we are is one family.”
And like the home of any family, the Underground Boxing Gym has no lockers.
“I’ve never had anyone tell me they had their watch, keys or wallet stolen,” Mesishchev said. “This is what I mean by respect and education. Boxing is a hard, sweaty, painful, bloody job and let’s face it, not everyone is going to be a world champion. But they leave as good people.”
In 1991, 20 years after “AJ” came into their lives, Bob and Frances Hambright started their canine treasure hunt. AJ was the couple's first pet Boston terrier, but he wasn’t their last. Four more followed, sparking a passion for the animal that’s resulted in the Boston Terrier Museum of Floydada, Texas.
The museum opened in 2007, brimming with collectibles and images of nothing but Boston terriers. Porcelains, walking sticks, books, vintage ads, trophies, Christmas ornaments, curtains, doorstops, pull-toys, and paintings all jam an old abandoned pharmacy building in downtown Floydada, in honor of the little tuxedoed bulldog.
Collecting started in earnest after Bob retired from the post office, and he and Frances hit the road. They travelled around the country, picking up Boston terriers (tchotchkes, not real ones) along the way. After Frances passed away, Bob kept on collecting, traveling less but visiting eBay and online auctions more. The collection grew, outpacing the space in Bob’s old workshop. With no end to acquiring in sight, he eventually took over the old pharmacy, and the Boston Terrier Museum was born.
Bob doesn’t keep regular hours, but a quick call will set you up (the number is on the outside of the building for those who just happen by). So many black and white pups in one place, you might be inspired to adopt a little “AJ” for yourself one day.
Hanging outside the homes across Bermuda are little vials of fluid that are the locals’ secret to predicting the island weather. Or so they say.
Bermuda has a long tradition of using shark oil as a meteorological tool, but the true efficacy and mechanics of the predator’s oil is a matter of debate. According to the Bermuda Institute of Ocean Sciences (BIOS), the local tradition of using a vial of shark oil to predict the weather has been in place for up to 300 years.
"Now where they developed, I don’t know," says Captain Alan Card, a lifelong Bermuda fisherman, now 69. "I can remember 65 years ago seeing a bottle of shark oil hanging down at the marina." Card has been looking to the barometers for just about his entire career. "The best one that I’ve seen used to be down at Somerset Bridge," he says. "Someone either broke it or stole it. You’d get to that barometer and think, ‘Huh. We’ve got some weather coming. It might not be today mind you, but we’ve got some weather coming.’"
The construction of the barometers is exceedingly simple—it’s just a small amount of oil extracted from a shark liver, sealed in glass. Sometimes that means a jar, an old wine bottle, or a more artful custom container. According believers in the barometers, like Card, the devices are able to predict oncoming weather with a fair degree of accuracy. When asked if they were effective, Card responded with a simple, "Hell, yeah."
Thatcher Adams, a local shark oil barometer expert who was referenced in a 1985 article in Yachting Magazine, said there are at least 40 different readable signals that can appear in a given oil barometer. Most of the readings have to do with the small amount of sediment contained in the liquid.
"We’ve got one batch in either a scotch bottle or a rum bottle, a Bacardi bottle, something like that," says Card. "It’s got two inches of white sediment on the bottom of the bottle." On days with perfect weather, the oil is clear. On overcast or rainy days, "you’ll look at it and you’ll find a little spiral or a little peak in the sediment. Then other days you look at it and it’s absolutely cloudy. It looks like milk, you can’t see through it."
The oil is said to begin swirling as hurricanes approach, and the way the sediment slopes can show which direction the wind is coming from. But the barometer is not just capable of predicting extreme weather—small variations in the peaks and valleys on the surface of the sediment, or crystals forming on the glass, are believed to portend more subtle weather situations.
An unsourced, but hand-drawn diagram of a shark oil barometer on Bermuda.com shows a few of the basic signs to be read from shark oil, including summer rains, which are indicated by rising bits of sediment, called, “rain seeds.” This diagram suggests that the sea can be predicted by the oil, the weather by the exposed glass, and even the horizon based on the surface of the oil. Along the top, it is rather poetically noted, “As The Oil, So Is The Sea / As The Glass, So Is The Sky.” Card says that it can take years of practice to learn to read shark oil, getting used to comparing its behavior to the actual weather.
While the construction of the barometer is simple, according to local lore, the collection of the main ingredient is surrounded by its own set of beliefs. In an article published by the BIOS, they not is believed that in order to extract the most accurate oil, the fluid must be taken from a small dusky shark (known locally as "puppy sharks"), ideally during a full moon. The relation between the phase of the moon and the efficacy of the oil seems to echo the general changes in the weather that accompany the shifting tides.
Card's account of the liver collection process is a bit more utilitarian. "You take a piece of the liver and put it in a stocking, for argument’s sake," he says. "You hang it up somewhere where it doesn’t get stinking in the bedroom. Outside somewhere. And over a period of days, the oil would leach out and fall in the bottle. You seal the bottle, and there you go, you’ve got your shark oil."
In terms of the science behind the fluctuations in the oil, traditional barometers work by measuring changes in atmospheric pressure, but shark oil barometers don’t seem to have any scientifically observed correlation to the air pressure. The science behind them is as murky as shark oil on a stormy day.
One theory posits that the oil reacts to the atmosphere while it is still in the shark, giving them an internal warning to avoid stormy waters, but the extracted oil doesn’t seem to prove that. Another, seemingly more outlandish theory, posited by Adams in the article in Yachting, is that the oil reacts to infrared radiation, which subtly affects the temperature of the liquid. According to a study conducted by BIOS, the oil does seem particularly sensitive to temperature, so maybe Adams’ theory has some merit.
We may not know exactly what drives shark oil barometers, but several hundred Bermudians still hang them outside their houses and around marinas. And they're not just for show. "We look at it," says Card. "Not on a daily basis, but when we know the weather’s gonna get shitty, I’ll ask them, ‘What’s the shark oil doing today?’"
The 12,000 headstones in the Old Jewish Cemetery are crumbling and covered with ivy, toppled and clustered together.
This was not Prague's first Jewish cemetery, but it is the oldest surviving in the city. The oldest burial date listed is 1439, though the cemetery was probably in use long before that, and the most recent burial was in 1787.
Burials ceased when a new decree prohibited interment in areas where people lived because of health risks. The notoriously dirty neighborhood of Josefov, where the Jewish cemetery is located, underwent serious cleanup and reconstruction efforts. Part of the cemetery was displaced for a new road, which meant the dead and their headstones were exhumed and stuffed into empty spaces in the already crowded plots.
There are upwards of 12,000 headstones in the cemetery, though it is speculated that as many as 100,000 individuals are buried beneath them, stacked 12 deep in some places. Jewish custom forbid the removal of old graves, so the dead were simply piled on top of one another for centuries. New dirt was even trucked in to create more earth for burials.
As Prague was a hub of Jewish scholasticism in Eastern Europe, it's no surprise that some of the foremost figures in Jewish history are buried here. Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel, a central character in the myth of the golem, is buried beneath an ornate sand-colored headstone decorated with a lion. The astronomer David Gans has the Star of David and a goose on his.
These symbols appear on the headstones of common graves as well. Along with the Hebrew script denoting the person buried below, the images engraved on the stones could communicate names ("Gans" means goose in German), professions (books for cantors; scissors for tailors), and characteristic traits (grapes for a full, prosperous life; the Star of David for devout Jews).
During the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia, historic synagogues and other sites were destroyed, effectively erasing the physical traces of Jewish culture. However, the Old Jewish Cemetery and the thousands of artifacts collected by the Jewish Museum escaped this fate through dark but fortunate providence. It is believed that the Nazis wished to save these items for a "Museum of an Extinct Race" in Prague, which would inform people of the future about the Jewish race wiped out by the Aryans. Thankfully this museum and its subject did not come to fruition, and the cemetery, along with the artifacts of the Jewish Museum, were spared.
Today, visitors can pay their respects to the thousands buried at the Old Jewish Cemetery through tours offered by Prague's Jewish Museum. Hundreds of pebbles and prayers written on tiny papers can be found resting atop the gravestones.
In China's Jiangxi province, in the country's southeast, a hydropower renovation project has revealed a centuries-old statue of the Buddha, his head peeking just above the water.
The statue was discovered in the Hongmen Reservoir, a vast water project that was constructed in 1958 and subsumed 63 villages and towns. Recently, reports Xinhua State News, during construction on a hydropower gate, the reservoir's level dropped 30 feet, and locals discovered the head of the statue exposed, just above the new water line.
Archaeologists have been dispatched to make a more thorough survey of the area. Based on the style of the statue's head, archaeologists believe it dates back to the Ming Dynasty, which ruled from the 14th to 17th century. The receding water also revealed an imperial decree and rectangular holes in the reservoir wall, which indicate that a building, likely a temple, had once been constructed here.
