The concept of a sheriff conjures up many romantic images of the Old West. The Sheriff's Museum located in historic old town San Diego not only honors that tradition but also educates visitors about what it's like to be in law enforcement today.
Although it looks small from the outside, this museum is actually 6,800 square feet of room after room of crime-fighting equipment and history.
There are many interactive exhibits such as the convenience store robbery crime scene, which engages the visitor to look for clues, to the reconstructed courtroom, where you can sit in the judge's chair and hand out justice. You can try on a bullet-proof vest, sit on a police motorcycle and turn on the siren, pretend to drive a sheriff's vehicle, or get locked up inside the jail.
There are also specialized sections dedicated to subjects like women in law enforcement, K9 units, search and rescue and weapons, and walls of remembrance for those who have died in the line of duty. If you find yourself in Old Town San Diego, it would be a crime to miss it.
The Old Sheldon Church was built in 1757, burned by the British in 1779, was subsequently rebuilt around 1825, and burned a second time in 1865 by Federal troops during Sherman's March to the Sea in the Civil War. Today, the ruins are a peaceful place for quiet reflection.
The grounds are owned and managed by St. Helena's Church in Beaufort. Permits for any professional photos or usage must be obtained from them. The grounds are available for religious services only for members of the congregation.
The New Yorker hotel's giant red sign dominates West 34th Street, and the hotel is often photographed as a city landmark, mostly on account of its name. Yet the history of the building is largely unknown. The New Yorker is filled with untold secrets and forgotten stories, including (though by no means limited to) the beautiful Art Deco tunnel that ran from the lobby to Penn Station, which is still hidden underneath 34th Street.
Today, thousands of tourists and New Yorkers walk by the bustling corner of Eighth Avenue and 34 Street not knowing that this humble hotel hides a vast private power plant that could have powered a small city; a gleaming forgotten bank vault underneath the lobby; and an old dining room that came complete with a retractable ice floor, where diners could sip cocktails while watching a twirling glamorous dance show.
But underneath the dance floor lies something even more remarkable and secret. Through the basement, beyond a sealed door, the tunnel is filled with excess old hotel fittings, chairs, carpets, and beautiful Art Deco tiling. Walking through the tunnel takes you directly underneath 34th Street in a zig-zag shape. At the far end is a brass door that would lead today onto the platform near the E line, though the MTA blocked the other side off sometime in the 1960s.
A 1930s brochure in the hotel archives advertises the tunnel as “So Convenient!” Showing a map of midtown Manhattan, it proudly notes that one of the leading amenities of the hotel is a “private tunnel linking the New Yorker to Penn Station.” Drawn on the map is a depiction of an underground pass leading from the hotel to not just Penn Station, but as far as the Empire State Building.
Today, part of the New Yorker’s revitalization has been its embrace and celebration of its Art Deco heritage. Artifacts from a meticulously collected archive are on display in the lobby and in a small adjacent museum, where visitors can experience the golden era of the hotel, while listening to the big bands who once graced its ballrooms.
Have you ever posed for a photo with your index and middle fingers raised, indicating your desire for world peace? Probably, since the sign has become shorthand for the sentiment after Vietnam War activists popularized it in the 1960s.
But researchers in Japan warned this week that those flashing their exposed fingertips were at risk of fingerprint theft, which in turn could be used for any number of things, like unlocking your iPhone.
Isao Echizen, a researcher at the National Institute of Informatics, said that he and his team were able to lift the fingerprints from someone's fingers from a photo taken about nine feet away, according to Phys.org.
The technology used to do this, Echizen says, was not very advanced, but as it so happens, the NII is developing a solution to this so-far-possibly-nonexistent-(?)-problem: a transparent film that would block thieves from decoding the tiny contours on your skin.
It won't be ready for public use for another couple of years, though. In the meantime, think long and hard about how strong your commitment to nonviolence is before, again, choosing to flash the V sign for cameras.
Britain is gearing up for a chilly weekend, as forecasters predict a bad cold snap. Even the local birdbaths are at the ready: as The Sun reports, residents have reported a rash of ice spikes, sharply pointed frozen spears that only form under specific conditions.
A good ice spike requires three things: contained water, a slight breeze, and temperatures that are cold but not too cold (around 7 degrees Fahrenheit is best). As the outside layer of water freezes, it expands, forcing the excess, liquid water up through the top layer of ice.
This water freezes as it escapes, eventually forming the spike. The breeze, coupled with a particular type of initial crystallization, encourages movement upward and helps with the jaunty angle.
Dangerous conditions aren't necessary for ice spikes—they've been known to show up in household freezers, in the cube trays. But they are fairly rare, and certainly ominous—although they do make a good perch for thirsty, foiled birds.
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.
At a glance, there is nothing especially notable about the patch of grass and scattered trees by a creek in Bladensburg, Maryland, just a few blocks beyond the border with Washington, D.C. But that creek, now reinforced with cement and looking more like a storm drain, was once known as "Blood Run," and the pastoral lawn was the setting of more than 50 political duels during the 1800s.
The Bladensburg dueling grounds became a popular spot for settling feuds during the 19th century (with some accounts stating that duels occurred here as far back as 1732) because despite being less than five miles from the Capitol building, it was technically outside the jurisdiction of Washington police.
Politicians, bureaucrats, and military officers would gather at this park to put an end to their disputes with blood. Congressmen Barent Gardenier and George Campbell dueled over differences of opinion over a trade embargo. Commodores Stephen Decatur and James Barron dueled over testimony in a court martial. Naval cadets Daniel Key and John Sherbourne dueled over a difference of opinion in regard to the speed of steamboats.
In 1839, Congress passed a law prohibiting the challenging or accepting of a duel within the nation's capital, after Congressman Jonathan Cilley was shot by fellow Congressman William Graves at Bladensburg over accusations of corruption. Even this didn't put an end to the bloodshed at this place, which writer George Alfred Townsend described as a “cross-roads Sodom.”
Over time, dueling slowly declined in popularity, and the last recorded showdown at the Bladensburg dueling grounds took place in 1868.
One of the charts that the National Snow and Ice Data Center produces shows the area of the Earth’s surface that is covered in sea ice over the course of the year, and for the past few months, the line showing the current amount of sea ice area has dribbled far below the line for every other year since 1978. The extent of sea ice on this planet is at a record low, certainly for the past 38 years and possibly for more than a millennium.
There is, right now (as of Jan 12th), the least area of sea ice on our planet that we've ever measured—probably the lowest in millennia. pic.twitter.com/6LrUKxBEOF
Even before Greek and Roman geographers had evidence that sea ice existed, they guessed that the ocean to the north of Europe must be frozen. They understood enough about the shape of the world and the way it worked that they could guess—travel towards a pole, and the air would grow colder. The sea might freeze. One geographer traveled in 300 B.C. north of Britain for six days, until he reached what may have been a barrier of sea ice. He described it as "the sea-lung," where the earth and sky became one, and reported he could go no further.
The first known written record of sea ice doesn't come until hundreds of years later. The first observers of Arctic sea ice to have their discovery recorded for posterity were not sailors or explorers, but Gaelic monks who had sailed from their own Irish island out into the ocean.
Christianity came to Ireland early in the 5th century: records show that a man called Palladius was sent to the island in 431 to be bishop to the Irish people, and St. Patrick is supposed to have shown up around the same time. By the 600s, monasteries had become thriving centers of learning and art; the beautiful Book of Kells was made in one around 800.
But not all of these early Irish monks were content to stay cloistered in these increasingly powerful institutions. Some chose to live in more isolated places, like the monastery on Skellig Michael. They sought instead a wilderness, some sort of desert where they could seek God. From a lush island, the ocean was the most obvious place to go.
There’s not much evidence left of the journeys of these monastic explorers, but in later years Norse stories had a name from them, the papar. Gaelic monks settled on empty northern islands—Orkney, Shetland—but it’s also possible that they found their way to Iceland, where manmade caves, decorated with crosses, have convinced some archaeologists that there were settlers here before the Vikings.
An early Irish geographer, Dicuil, also writes of “priests who stayed on that island from the first of February to the first of August.” The year would have been 795, and Dicuil briefly notes a journey they took north. “These priests then sailed hence and, in day’s sail, did reach the frozen sea to the north.”
That brief mention is usually considered the first written record of Arctic sea ice. Iceland was settled more permanently in the 900s, and the people living there started keeping records of sea ice and icebergs that an Icelandic geographer later used to reconstruct sea ice records in the area going back to 1,000 A.D.
More systematic records of Arctic sea ice weren’t collected until about a millennium after Iceland was first settled. In the 1880s, the Danish Meteorological Institute started drawing up sea ice charts using reports from the shore and sea, from ships and scientific expeditions, as the National Snow & Ice Data Center explains, and by the turn of the century, the institute was regularly publishing a report on "The State of the Ice in the Arctic Seas” that covered the whole Arctic.
Those charts were one of the best sources of records about Arctic sea ice, until the 1950s, when more reliable and variable data became available from ships and satellites. The record for Antarctic sea ice is spotty; shipping records and the logs of Antarctic explorers are the best sources of information. In 1978, satellites started collecting data on sea ice to create a continuous record, and that’s the data that shows that this year is the worst of those 38 for sea ice. But those satellites are aging, and there’s no guarantee they’ll be replaced. Without those satellite data, scientists will only know how the sea ice is faring by collecting observations from ships and intrepid travelers, like the ancient Irish monks.
In 1983, the USS Coral Sea CV-43 Catapult One was cruising the Atlantic Ocean, and the engineering department discovered a small problem. The ship had an excess of small plastic bottles, meant to test oil. Someone in the department came up with a fun way to deal with the overstock: Let the crew use them to send out messages into the open ocean.
Ron Herbst was 19 and serving on the ship as a petty officer. He wrote two messages, put them in two bottles, and dropped them into the ocean.
Sometime that year, Gordon and Cindy Brevik found his message. And recently they finally found Herbst, reports the Pensacola News-Journal.
The Breviks were living in Palm Springs at the time time, and they had taken a boat out to dive in the Florida Keys. They found Herbst’s bottle and his simple message:
"I am sending this off of the USS Coral Sea CV-43 Catapult One! We are currently on a world cruise deployment.”
Not long after that, the Breviks moved to Mena, Arkansas, and for many years they pulled out that message-in-a-bottle as a curiosity to show Cindy Brevik’s students. Eventually, they forgot about it, but recently, getting ready to move again, they rediscovered the bottle and the message.
This time, they decided to track Herbst down.
The original message had included his name and address, so the Breviks had a few clues as to how to find him. They found a likely candidate on Facebook and sent him a message: "Were you by any chance on the USS Coral Sea in 1983?”
After he threw those bottles of the ship back in 1983, Herbst had forgotten about them. The other message was found that same year, by a woman in Virginia Beach, who contacted him to let him know she’d found it. The other disappeared from his memory, until he heard from the Brevik this past Christmas.
“I couldn’t believe they had held onto it for that long,” he told the News-Journal.
In Vila Nova de Famalicão, Portugal, just outside an unassuming house, sits a seemingly ordinary piece of land. A stand of mature eucalyptus trees towers over smaller, shrubby growth. Wild green plants blanket the ground. A grassy hill rises over a dry streambed, which winds its way through a cleared-out patch.
Look closely, though, and you’ll see signs of a previous iteration of this area. Tufts of jet-black grass poke through the ground cover. The dirt is mixed with ashes. Diamond dust glitters in the streambed. For four days in 2011, the land here served as the backdrop of the artist Philippe Parreno’s short film C.H.Z. (Continuously Habitable Zones). Years later, it’s still recuperating from a massive costume change.
The set-dressing project, known as “Landscape for a planet with two dwarf suns,” was created by Bas Smets, a landscape designer from Brussels. According to the architectural historian Marc Treib's recent history of the project, Parreno and Smets met by chance, in a jazz bar sometime in the mid-2000s. What started as a conversation about the difference between "land" and "landscape" soon became a collaboration. In 2011, Parreno asked Smets for his help making a film about an alien planet, in which the "where" overtook the "who" or "what" and became the story’s main focus.
Parreno's film explores a planet in the Continually Habitable Zone, NASA's term for an area of a solar system where the existence of life is theoretically possible. Planets within such a zone are far enough from their nearest star to avoid blistering surface temperatures, but close enough to not be permanently frozen. Recent discoveries have shown that such conditions are possible not only for planets that orbit a single sun, but for those with two or even three central stars.
Many such binary stars are red dwarfs, smaller and cooler than our own, which is a yellow dwarf. Our sun's light appears white to us because it contains wavelengths of all different colors, from red to purple. Scientists think that plants on our planet appear green because bacteria snagged that wavelength early for their own photosynthetic endeavors. Plants then evolved to reflect the green section of the spectrum, and absorb the rest.
A red dwarf, or even two, would provide less light overall, and some researchers have speculated that plants on such planets would evolve to perform "hyperphotosynthesis," absorbing the entire visible spectrum. Instead of green, they would appear black. For his film, Parreno asked Smets to build a landscape inspired by this kind of alien realism.
After considering a few different land parcels, Smets settled on a private garden in Vila Nova de Famalicao, which had been offered up by its owners, a couple of art collectors who wanted to see what he'd do with it. He then brainstormed and sketched potential extraterrestrial landscape elements—a "burnt hill," "black plants," trees with exposed roots—and went about constructing them with materials available on Earth. First, he and his team cleared a patch of land of much of its original vegetation. Then, as the local fire brigade watched, they burned what was left, until the ground itself was a smoked, tarry black.
Next came a streambed, carved sinuously through the middle of the land parcel, and left bone dry. Smets filled this with slabs of black slate, chunks of obsidian, and broken glass. For an intergalactic version of a grassy hill, he terraced a slope and replanted it with black mondo grass, a droopy, deep purple turf plant that grows dark, glossy berries.
He covered other patches of ground with black hollyhocks, orchids, and bugleweed. In the middle of one forested spot, Smets dug a large hollow, and lined it with eucalyptus roots left over from earlier cuttings, as if a massive tree had recently been pulled out of the earth. When the cameras started rolling, Smets's crew added atmospheric elements—diamond dust blown over the creek bed, and smoke and foam released just above the charred ground.
You'd be hard-pressed to find an existing landscape with these elements. Still, Smets made sure that "the filmic landscape... represent[ed] its own coherent ecology," says Treib. In the film, with the help of editing, cinematography, lights, and special lenses, viewers see a complete space, almost like an extraterrestrial hiking destination. They're taken along a glittering "mineral river," the glass and diamond dust enhanced by floodlights overhead, and given a glimpse up over a black-grassed terrace, where one of two suns rises overhead.
The darkness is disconcerting "only when related to the earth of our own planet," Treib says. "Can we instead imagine a planet whose territory has always been black… its black stones and crystalline glass the norm rather than the product of some apocalypse?"
These days, the small apocalyptic actions of the film crew are quickly being reversed. "Nature, to a large degree, has had its way" with the site, says Treib, who visited in late 2014. Green plants dot the dry river, shooting up between the chunks of slate. Undergrowth has returned to the eucalyptus forest. The mondo grass, more at home in slightly cooler climates, has largely ceded its space to native vegetation. Despite the landscape's initial commitment to its role, its star turn is now barely apparent—unless, that is, you know to keep an eye out for the occasional black flower, or to watch for the sun's rays glinting off broken glass.
Back in 2005, the Galleria at Pittsburgh Mills opened 1.1 million square feet of retail space, welcoming Western Pennsylvania shoppers to what was then the largest mall in that part of the state.
At its peak, according to the Associated Press, the mall was valued at $190 million, which is a lot of money, anchored by JCPenney and, at first, a Kaufmann's, which later became Macy's.
But on Wednesday, the mall was sold for just $100 at auction—the conclusion of a long fall from grace. These days, the mall is just over half occupied, and its now-former owner, a company called Pittsburgh Mills Limited Partnership, recently defaulted on a $143 million bank loan.
This meant foreclosure, and, on Wednesday, an auction to sell the mall to the highest bidder. That turned out to be a trust known as MSCI 2007 HQ11, which hasn't commented on the purchase and got the mall on the cheap—likely because any new buyer would also have to assume operating expenses, tax payments, and other costs for the shopping center. In addition, the mall has suffered a steep decline in value, being appraised recently at just $11 million.
The future, now, is uncertain, though according to KDKA, the mall never even fulfilled its original promise, which included plans for a water park and go-kart track.
One shopper told the station, simply: "It's very sad."
Pravčická brána, or "Pravčice Gate," is Europe's largest natural bridge, a massive sandstone arch that's been attracting visitors for as long as people have been appreciating natural wonders.
Part of the Elbe Sandstone Mountains, the arch towers in the České Švýcarsko National Park on the border of Germany, stretching nearly 90 feet wide and 50 feet high. The natural bridge is the symbol for the region, whose mountainous peaks and beautiful forests have earned it the nickname Bohemian, or Czech, Switzerland.
The rock outcropping is made all the more wondrous by the picturesque chateau built right into the rock face, dubbed the Sokolí hnízdo, or "Falcon's Nest." It was built in 1881 from a previous inn by the powerful Austro-Hungarian Clary-Aldringen family to house important guests. While princes or dignitaries no longer stay at the chateau, it has been preserved as a period restaurant and a museum dedicated to the history of the park.
Eight miles north of Shoshone, Idaho, off Highway 75 and two miles down a dirt road, is the Shoshone Bird Museum of Natural History. This little DIY museum holds a lot more than just birds though.
The collection is astounding in its size alone: There are hundreds of artifacts, including a wealth of taxidermy, African art, Alaskan fishing equipment, Stone Age tools, fossils, and various other historic and natural wonders of the world. A moderately close perusal would take several hours.
The building itself is a treasure too. Built from raw black lava rocks, individually stacked, the construction of the circular museum took 30 years. The museum is a family project, separately owned by three generations of Olsen men, all of them collectors. A complete history is available onsite, and a tour of the museum incorporates family history into explanation of the curiosities.
Also onsite is Mammoth Cave, a lava rock cave used by Stone Age settlers. It was discovered by the second Olsen in 1954, who used it to grow mushrooms, and later opened it as a public attraction alongside his museum. In the 1960s the government designated the cave as a Civil Defense Shelter. In the event of Soviet attack, citizens could take refuge in the cavern, just as settlers long before them had. Though the threat of nuclear attack has faded since then, the dirt road leading to the museum still bears the name "Mammoth Cave Civil Defense Shelter Road."
A larger-than-life bronze statue memorializes Barry M. Goldwater, the five-term U.S. Senator from Arizona, 1964 Republican nominee for President, and arguably the founding father of postwar American conservatism.
Commissioned by the Town of Paradise Valley, the senator's longtime home, the 1.5 times life-size statue was unveiled in 2004 by cowboy artist Joe Beeler. It stands in a small botanical garden that includes a path inlaid with stones inscribed with noteworthy Goldwater quotes.
The senator is depicted facing west, with a camera in his right hand, a reference to his photographic avocation. Medallions set into Anasazi-style stone walls mark milestones in his life.
Flinders Street Station, the busiest railway hub in all of Australia, is home to a decaying beauty of a ballroom, an abandoned leftover from the bygone era of railroad romance.
While the station serves nearly 100,000 travelers a day, the old third floor ballroom, closed off from the public since 1985, rarely opens it doors to visitors. Viewing the space has been so coveted in recent years that during Open House Melbourne (an annual celebration of design and urban preservation) special entry was granted by a secret “Golden Ticket,” tucked into a lucky few visitors’ programs.
Designed in 1899 by James Fawcett and H. P. C. Ashworth, Flinders Street Station opened in 1910, and quickly became a Melbourne icon. The space occupied by the Ballroom was originally the lecture hall of the Victorian Railways Institute, an association established to provide "betterment of railway staff."
This included night courses, a lending library, and physical fitness classes. There were also “men only” spaces, such as a billiard room, table tennis, and a private gym with a boxing ring and running track on the roof.
The heyday of the ballroom was in the 1950s and 60s, when public dances would fill the hall, always sure to finish on time so they could catch the last train home. All these accommodations are long-gone, but the spaces they occupied are there, just waiting to be rediscovered.
As of early 2017, the station is about to undergo a major overhaul and renovation, including a return to the original colors of the early 20th century. For the ballroom itself, the Victorian Government has put together a business plan to bring it all back to life—hopefully that will happen soon. The dancers are just waiting to catch that train.
One of the more unusual graves at Dayton's Woodland Cemetery features a little boy resting beneath the paws of a large dog.
Five-year-old Johnny Morehouse was the youngest son of a cobbler in Dayton in the 1860s. He was playing with his pet dog by the Miami & Erie Canal when he fell into the water. His dog leapt in after him and tried to rescue the boy, but was unsuccessful. Johnny drowned and was buried at Woodlawn Cemetery. Allegedly the dog stood by the grave for weeks, waiting for Johnny and subsisting on scraps given him by sympathetic mourners.
Johnny's story is most likely remembered because of his poignant gravestone. It depicts the little boy nestled against his dog, and surrounded by a harmonica, a cap, a ball, and a top. Visitors touched by the tender monument to the child's death will leave behind additional gifts–the headstone is frequently covered in flowers and toys.
The Gambia, the tiniest country on the African mainland, is shaped unlike any other nation in the world. It is long and skinny, just 30 miles wide at its widest points; it looks like someone tried to stick their finger into Senegal, which surrounds the Gambia on three sides. The only bit of the country that doesn’t border Senegal is the Gambia's very short coastline.
On Thursday, troops from Senegal and allied West African nations crossed the border into the Gambia in support of the tiny country’s newly elected president, after the current leader refused to cede power. Senegal has an obvious interest in the country’s leadership; the fastest way to reach the southern part of Senegal from the north is to drive through the Gambia. As a geographical arrangement, it makes so little sense that the obvious question to ask is: Why does it exist?
There’s an apocryphal story, rooted in the colonial history of West Africa, that accounts for the Gambia’s unusual shape and location. Through the 18th and 19th centuries, French and British colonialists were vying for power and resources in this region, which was an economic center for the slave trade, among other industries. The British were also interested in finding an easy route inland, to Timbuktu and its fabled riches.
There are only a few rivers on the coast of West Africa that run inland towards the desert, and the French controlled the mouth of the more northerly one, the Senegal River. The Gambia River, further south, where the British had more control, runs parallel, and, as the story goes, a British warship simply navigated up the river, shooting cannonballs off either side and claiming the land that fell within cannon range. The result: A river-shaped country made up solely of the strips of land on either side of the water.
As bizarre and improbable as this story seems, there are nuggets of truth to it: the British did claim rights to the Gambia River, and the country’s strange shape emerged from conflict between the two colonizing powers. There may even have been cannonballs involved.
The first European power to lay some claim to the Gambia River was Portugal; the country’s modern name comes from the Portuguese word cambio, trade. The British first started traveling to the river in the late 16th century; throughout the 17th century, British, Dutch, and French trading companies were all trying to establish a presence on what’s now the coast of Senegal and the Gambia, sometimes clashing with each other over the control of islands at the riverine mouths. The Gambia River and the islands at its mouth were important for Britain to control, strategically; they were the empire’s main outpost on this part of the coast and a connection to its settlements and trading posts along the Gold Coast, in Sierra Leone and Ghana.
The amount of land that any of these colonial powers controlled, though, was very small, usually just an island that allowed them to travel and trade further inland and to store goods headed back to Europe. Even if Britain controlled the Gambia River, it didn’t control most of the land on the riverbanks, outside of a few small settlements and, after 1826, a one-mile strip of land on the northern bank, ceded by the king who ruled the area.
But in the 19th century, France changed its strategy and started trying control more inland area, moving from its more northern settlements south towards the Gambia River. In 1888, in order to establish a formal claim to its Gambian outposts, Britain made the Gambia a protectorate. Since the French did recognize the British claim to control of the river and its area, the two colonial superpowers opened negotiations about where exactly the boundary between the two would lie. An early negotiation put the boundary at six miles north and south of the river and east to Yarbutenda, the furthest navigable point on the river.
That was supposed to just be a starting point, with a joint Anglo-French Boundary Commission dispatched to map the actual border. But when the commission arrived in 1891, it encountered resistance from local rulers, whose land was being divided up, sometimes right in the middle of their kingdom. The Boundary Commission had back up, though, from British ships patrolling the river.
There’s no evidence that the British ever fired cannonballs off the sides of their ships to establish the borders of the Gambia in the middle of French territory. But it’s not a bad shorthand for what actually did happen: two colonial powers using force to divide up part of a world according to a bizarre logic of colonial power, only marginally concerned with the people who would have to live there.
Tombs of the Kings is an ancient necropoliscontaining numerous large tombs dating from the 4th century BCE to the 3rd century AD. The name is something of a misnomer as no kings are thought to have been buried here. The name, rather, refers to the magnificence of the tombs, which were the burial places of wealthy senior government officials and aristocrats.
Many of the tombs are very elaborate with decorated walls and columns carved out of the solid rock. The site is fascinating and very important historically, dubbed a UNESCO World heritage site. A particular type of amphora was commonly buried with the dead and these ceramics always contain a stamp that allows archaeologists to date them and other items found in the same burial.
Standing a diminutive 43 feet tall, Cuexcomate is commonly known as the world's smallest volcano. However it's technically it's not a volcano, but a geyser. The little mountain was allegedly born out of an eruption from the most famous volcano in Mexico, the Popocatépetl or "Popo." Either way, it's one of the cutest and most formidable attractions in the colonial city of Puebla.
When indigenous people discovered this tiny volcano, they realized the temperature was cool inside, perfect for storing meals and grains to keep them fresh. This is why it's known as Cuexcomate, meaning a small bowl to save things in.
Later, when the Spanish conquered Puebla, it became a colonial tradition to dump the bodies of suicide victims inside the little volcano, so as to "send them to hell." Though this practice has ceased, people living in La Libertad neighborhood around Cuexcomate are still sometimes jokingly known as "sons of the devil's belly button."
Though Popo is still active, releasing gas and ash as recently as August of 2016, Cuexcomate has been declared inactive, its last eruption being sometime in the early 1660s. As such, people can descend down into the volcano, where (once their eyes have adjusted to the darkness) they'll see an underground stream and waterfall pouring into a hole. People believe that the one hole at the very bottom of the "volcano" is its mouth, feeding in from the larger reserves of Popocatépetl. If you hold your hand above the water you can feel heat radiating from it.
The people use this hole to make wishes with the help of the mother nature's power. It may be prudent to wish that the little volcano remains dormant. Despite it's inactivity, Cuexcomate could still erupt someday, and locals are occasionally evacuated in preparation.
In February 2009, a glorious triumph occurred on Parliament Hill in London's Hampstead Heath park: a gigantic snowball (weighing about half a ton) tumbled down the white slopes.
The video above, appropriately titled "The Story of the Giant Snowball," documents the "birth and death" of the massive boulder of snow. A group of volunteers began building the snowball near the historic Kenwood House, located on the edge of Hampstead Heath. Covered and stuffed with leaves and gravel, the snowball reached chest height. The team worked together to push the completed snowball up the hill.
At the 42-second mark, the grand moment occurs. A large, roaring crowd cheers as dozens of people roll the ginormous creation down the slope. As the snowball gains momentum, people chase it down the hill. One particularly brave individual jumps on top of the ball at the 50-second mark for a short ride before toppling to the ground and narrowly avoiding getting squashed.
The success of the great roll of the giant snowball was the result of "a huge group effort by random strangers," wrote a witness in the post of a separate clip.
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 early American colonists were ferocious drinkers. Hot ale flips, warming wassails and planter’s punches were consumed in such alarming quantities that Benjamin Franklin published over 200 synonyms for being tipsy in the Pennsylvania Gazette on January 6, 1737.
Such was the standing of the tavern in the fledgling society, that colonial law actually required every town to have one. In low-ceilinged rooms, the early colonials would gather and, in the words of Benjamin Franklin, start the evening “loose in the hilts,” gradually becoming “nimptopsical,” finishing the night “wamble Crop’d,” before stumbling home “right before the Wind with all his Studding Sails out.”
The signage, though, was a rather difficult design challenge. While today restaurants and bars are often easily identifiable by the form and shape of their buildings, historic watering holes were virtually indistinguishable from the private residences on either side of them. They were literally public houses. The painted and carved saloon signs hanging outside would signpost to visitors that food, drinks and lodging were to be had inside.
Being made of wood, many of the old tavern signs have been lost to time. Between 1750 and 1850, there were approximately 50,000 of these signs mounted up and down the Eastern seaboard. Only a fraction of them still exist. The largest collection of colonial-era bar and inn signage in the country, at the Connecticut Historical Society in Hartford, counts 60 specimens, a remarkable collection evoking the earliest days of America’s boozing habit.
