By cactus standards, Rhipsalis baccifera is, for the most part, average. Sure, it has long, spindly stems that can grow up to 30 feet long, and hang down from the canopy like monstrous green dreadlocks. And yeah, it's an epiphyte, so it survives by sucking moisture from the very air. But in a family flush with plants that grow six-inch spines, can go two years without water, and emit psychedelics to drive off animals, these attributes are relatively small potatoes.

But there's one very special thing about R. baccifera—it's the only species of cactus that is found naturally outside of the Americas. Unlike all of its relatives, R. baccifera has grown wild in Africa and India at least since botanical record-keeping began. This plant—also known as the "Mistletoe Cactus" or the "Spaghetti Cactus" for its white berries and dangling stems—has traveled thousands of miles away from all of its brethren. And despite decades of study, scientists still aren't quite sure how it pulled this off. 

If you're looking for cacti in their native habitat, you'd be best served by sticking to the Western hemisphere. With the exception of our our friend R. baccifera, "cacti occur naturally from just south of the Arctic Circle in Canada to the tip of Patagonia in South America," write Jon P. Rebman and Donald J. Pinkava in Florida Entomologist. Thanks to their legendary survival strategies, cacti can hack it in a broad variety of altitudes and climates, from bone-dry valleys to dripping rainforests.

R. baccifera can be found growing wild from mid-Argentina through Central America and up into the heart of Florida. But it's also endemic in tropical Africa, Madagascar, and Sri Lanka. How did it end up all those places? As the botanist Ali Eyres explains on the Reading University Tropical Biodiversity blog, experts have come up with a number of competing theories, some more likely than others, but all somewhat improbable.

In the first scenario, R. baccifera followed the path of many other plants—its seeds got a lift from hungry, migrating birds. Birds are known to gobble up fruits, digest them over the ocean, and excrete the seeds far away. (This is how olives got to Australia, and tropical "cardinal's hats" to temperate Europe.) R. baccifera's seeds are held by plump, tasty white berries—thus its nickname, the "Mistletoe Plant."

The prevailing theory among many biogeographers is that, at some point in the past, a long-flying species of bird took a liking to these berries, snacked on them, and then migrated to southern Africa, where they passed the seeds and begat a new plant. From there, more birds spread the cactus to more places, until it had the broad, unusual range we see today.

There are some issues with this theory. For one, it's not clear what birds could have pulled this off. As J. Hugo Cota-Sánchez and Márcia C. Bomfim-Patrício point out in Polibotanica, "frugivorous birds are not able to cross the Atlantic Ocean from South America to Southern West Africa." They go on to explain that while a tropical storm or ocean currents might have pushed the seeds from shore to shore on their own, that's also a rather long shot.

This brings us to the second possibility: the "continental breakup" theory, first advanced by botanical detectives in the early 20th century. In this scenario, neither R. baccifera nor birds had to travel thousands of miles. The Earth did it for them.

As Phillip Maxwell sums up in the New Zealand Cactus and Succulent Journal, there's no need to puzzle out dispersal mechanisms if we simply assume that our heroic cactus was around during the breakup of the supercontinent of Gondwana, about 184 million years ago. In this scenario, as Gondwana separates into what we now know as Africa and South America, some R. baccifera is left on each side of the divide, slowly drifting apart until—millions of years of tectonic shifts later—they're in completely different time zones.

This theory has also gotten pushback: while no one is certain when cacti evolved, most estimates put the date around five to ten million years ago, far too late to have experienced Gondawna. And if they did show up early enough to hang out on the supercontinent, it's strange that no other species of the hardy plant family managed to make it to Africa and India.

The third and final scenario is a little more human. In the 1980s, several biologists floated the idea that R. baccifera might have crossed the ocean with the help of sailors, potentially 16th century merchants taking on the East India Route. Before they shoved off from Brazil, this theory goes, they gathered up one of the rainforest's most beguiling plants, R. baccifera, which dangled gracefully from the trees and, thanks to its ability to survive without soil, could easily survive the journey. 

They used it to brighten up the ship's quarters, and then left it when they hit port again in Africa. While Maxwell calls this theory "risible," pointing out that R. baccifera isn't actually that eye-popping and doesn't occur near African port cities, Cota-Sánchez and Bomfim-Patrício cite it as the most likely.

We may never know exactly how R. baccifera became such a well-traveled cactus. But today, as crossing borders becomes ever more fraught, it's worth remembering that with the right support, even a humble epiphyte can make it pretty far.

Naturecultures is a weekly column that explores the changing relationships between humanity and wilder things. Have something you want covered (or uncovered)? Send tips to cara@atlasobscura.com.

In April of 1941, laborers began building the concrete behemoths in La Rochelle's harbor. The massive pens were to hold the "Unterseeboots," one of Germany's most formidable weapons during World War II. 

Because of their essential place in Nazi warfare, the U-boat pens had to be built in secret. Most of the construction was performed at night, illuminated by spotlight that would be extinguished at the hint of danger, leaving the workers (mostly Spanish and Portuguese prisoners of war) in pitch darkness. By 1942 the pens could hold 13 U-boats. With a complicated series of locks, underwater pens could be drained, and the submarines hauled up by crane to workshops. 

Due to its advantageous position on the Atlantic, some of the most serious U-boat missions of WWII were launched from La Rochelle pens. The city remained under German control until 1945, one of the last French cities to be liberated by the Allies, after which the U-boat pens sat empty. Today, they are intermittently used by the French navy, and as such are not open to the public. They are, however, visible from the adjacent road and hard to miss.

Illinois resident Jim Elliott has a passion: improving the lives of people with disabilities by teaching them to scuba dive. And embedded in this passion is a dream: to build the deepest warm-water swimming pool the world has ever seen.

According to the Chicago Tribune, this dream may soon become reality. Over the past year, he has been working with a development company in downtown Aurora to transform a former landfill into a set of scuba training pools, including one that will be 150 feet deep.

Elliott is the founder and president of Diveheart, an organization that brings scuba training to people suffering from chronic pain, PTSD, paralysis, and other conditions. Deep-water activities are extremely helpful, he told the Tribune—they build confidence, release serotonin, and may even promote healing through hyperbaric oxygen therapy.

@SightCenterNH in Portland Me learning about the great work @diveheart@AERBVI#disabilitiespic.twitter.com/crbOQxfCph

— David S. Morgan (@DavidMorganCEO) November 16, 2016

But to get these benefits, the pool has to be deep enough—at least 66 feet, says Elliott. To allow for technical dive training, you need to go deeper, to 130 feet. Once he found out that Italy already has a pool 137 feet deep, he decided, why not try to outmatch them?

The site in Aurora is perfect, Elliott says: it's near medical facilities, an airport, and train stations. Plus, there's the whole landfill thing, "which would make that deep dig less difficult," the Tribune writes.

Plans have not yet been finalized, but we'll keep you posted.

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 1840s United States and U.K., hopeful American and British lovers sent lacy valentines with cursive flourishes and lofty poems by the thousands. But what to do, if you didn’t love the person who had set their eyes on you?

In the Victorian era, there was no better way to let someone know they were unwanted than with the ultimate insult: the vinegar valentine. Also called penny dreadfuls or “comic valentines,” these unwelcome notes were sometimes crass and always a bit emotionally damaging in the anti-spirit of Valentine’s Day.

Vinegar valentines were commercially bought postcards that were less beautiful than their love-filled counterparts, and contained an insulting poem and illustration. They were sent anonymously, so the receiver had to guess who hated him or her; as if this weren’t bruising enough, the recipient paid the postage on delivery. In Civil War Humor Cameron C. Nickels wrote that vinegar valentines were “tasteless, even vulgar,” and were sent to “drunks, shrews, bachelors, old maids, dandies, flirts, and penny pinchers, and the like.” He added that in 1847, sales between love-minded valentines and these little notes of in-affection were split at a major New York valentine publisher.

Some vinegar valentines were playful or sarcastic, and sold as comic valentines to soldiers, but many could hold a sting. “Lady Shoppers” and salesmen were sent or handed vinegar valentines admonishing their values; some vinegar valentines named physicians “Doctor Sure-Death” who ran expensive bills or chided the “stupid postman” who was sending the note. One vinegar valentine titles “Old Maid” and reprinted by Orange Coast magazine in 1984, is more than a little harsh:

“’Tis all in vain your simpering looks,
You never can incline,
With all your bustles, stays and curls,
To find a Valentine.”

The women’s suffrage movement of the late 19th and early 20th century brought another class of vinegar valentines, targeting women who fought for the right to vote. While only a small percentage of mean-spirited cards were devoted to suffragists, Kenneth Florey argues in American Woman Suffrage Postcards that “it is clear from their context that an interest in women’s rights was an inherent part of one’s distorted personality,” depicting such women as ugly abusers. It isn’t known whether these were sent directly to troll women’s rights activists or if they were sent to like-minded friends who disagreed with the movement.

Suffragists did have their own pro-women’s rights valentines to pass around on February 14. Florey wrote that one threw shade on anti-suffragists with the phrase “no vote, no kiss.” But, in light of the supposed unattractiveness of suffragists according to men, many 19th-century woman enticed would-be lovers by sending cards that denied support of the women’s rights cause. One of these cards, quoted by Florey, depicted a pretty woman surrounded by hearts, with a plain appeal: “In these wild days of suffragette drays, I’m sure you’d ne’er overlook a girl who can’t be militant, but simply loves to cook.”

Many vinegar valentines from the late 19th century were drawn by Charles Howard, who put ridiculous caricatures of the sorry recipient in full color. An issue of Kindergarten Primary Magazine from 1895 worried about the moral implications of these cards for children; a teacher from Iowa wrote that she staved off the “desire to send vulgar valentines” by telling students stories from St. Valentine’s treacherous life. The magazine said that teachers must do what they could to help “make it a day for kind remembrance than a day for wrecking revenge.”

Valentines and vinegar valentines alike were once a booming business; in 1905 San Francisco, 25,000 valentines were delayed because of overworked clerks. The more surly cards weren’t always welcomed by postmasters, however; another 25,000 valentines were held in a Chicago post office for being unfit to send, due to the many rude and vinegar valentines in the haul.

As adult valentines declined in lieu of expensive dinners or gifts, the vinegar valentine became less popular, though in some locations in the 1970s, they were still selling well. While some might mourn the romantic February 14 of the past with its long poems and declarations of love, most of us might thank the change in trend—it’s also much less likely we’ll get a nasty note in the mail as a Valentine’s surprise.

The Chicago suburb of Berwyn is home to the largest laundromat in the world, measuring in at 13,500 square feet and featuring 301 machines. The extraordinary facility is adorned with 16 TV screens, an aviary filled with finches, a massage chair, and arcade games along its front windows. The walls are painted and the word “welcome” is written in neon in 31 different languages, a testament to the multiculturalism present in Berwyn.

The World’s Largest Laundromat doesn’t just claim to hold the world record, it has evidence to prove it. In 1983, the Coin Laundry Association surveyed all potential contenders and empirically declared the Berwyn laundromat to be the one and only title holder, a claim to fame that has remained in place to this day.

Tom Benson, the owner of the World’s Largest Laundromat—as it is simply and straightforwardly known—views the laundromat less as an ordinary facility and more as a “third place,” a community gathering space outside of home and work. 

Benson dedicated his spare time to perfecting the laundromat. There are four vending machines, free pizza on Wednesday nights, and daily free coffee and donuts. The community center even holds immigration forums to help prepare local residents for citizenship interviews. 

From some back-of-the-envelope calculations, Benson estimated that roughly a quarter of Berwyn’s laundromat-goers were under the age of 16. So to brighten up the lives of Berwyn's youth, he built a small play area for the kids with activities like face painting, clowns, and Santa during Christmas. To stay green, the World’s Largest Laundromat uses 36 solar panels to heat their water and puts on a fireworks show every year. And, to ensure that the World’s Largest Laundromat is open 24/7, Benson professes that “I don’t have a key! There is no key! Everything’s automatic doors, and they’re always on!"

In the photo, Harriet Tubman is still relatively young, perhaps in her early or mid-forties. She would live into her 90s, and many of the photos of her show her as an older woman. In this photo, which sat unknown in a photo album for decades, Tubman is in her prime, perhaps enjoying the respite from her work guiding slaves to freedom.

"This is the vibrant young Tubman just coming off her work during the Civil War. She's building her life with her family in Auburn,” Kate Clifford Larson, a Tubman biographer, told The Citizen, a paper based in Auburn, New York.

Before the Civil War began, Tubman bought a piece of land in Auburn. The photo was found in a photo album that once belonged to Emily Howland, an abolitionist and friend of Tubman.

The photo is being auctioned as part of an album by New York City’s Swann Galleries in March, along with checks signed by Martin Luther King, Jr., and a speech by Frederick Douglass. According to the auction house, the photo was discovered by one of their specialists; the album includes images of other abolitionists and 19th century political figures.

A version of this story originally appeared on Muckrock.com.

Through FOIA, Motherboard’s Jason Koebler managed to receive a handful of investigatory reports from NASA regarding missing property, covering cases as weird as satellite parts ending up on eBay or a “wheelbarrow full” of sensitive documents ending up in a off-site dumpster. However, no case is stranger - or sadder - than the “stolen moon rocks.”

Back in 2014, NASA received a tip from a woman, name redacted, that her now-dead step-father had received a moon rock as a gift while working at Texas A&M. She claimed that this moon rock was “the size of a large apple” and weighed a little over a pound. The most conservative estimate would put the value around $2.5 million - at an estimated $275,000 per gram (the 1973 valuation adjusted for inflation), that would put the rock’s total value in the range of $125 million dollars.

So of course her step-dad made necklaces with it.

The informant gave said necklace - which, for maximum emotional value we must assume was a heartfelt gift - to NASA for analysis. Whereupon they quickly determined it was not, in fact, a moon rock, but a terrestrial rock - also known as a rock.

Which NASA then FedEx’d back to its sender, with all participants sadder and wiser for the experience.

So, what happened - did somebody at Texas A&M prank the unsuspecting step-father with “an authentic moon rock,” or was it his own private in-joke? While we’ll likely never know, at least the lesson here is clear enough: never look a gift moon rock necklace in the laser-induced breakdown spectrometer.

The full list of NASA investigation reports is embedded below:

Paranapiacaba is a small municipality outside São Paulo with a distinctly British appearance. The town in 1867 was the operation headquarters and home for the employees of the English-owned São Paulo Railway. The town's stone buildings look straight out of a London exurb and a clocktower looms above the jungle mist in the old train yard. 

The São Paulo Railway carried both people and cargo (mostly coffee) between the interior of São Paulo and the port of Santos. Its greatest technological achievement was the funicular: a train shuttle built specifically for the steep mountain incline.

At its peak Paranapiacaba housed 4,000 engineers, laborers, and their families. However, as automated technology rendered the 19th century funicular obsolete, the depot ceased to be as essential for transporting goods down from the mountain and out to the coast. As Brazil grew more interconnected, the São Paulo Railway was bought out by the Brazilian government in the 1940s. The funicular from the Paranapiacaba train station remained in use until 1980, after which it was only run occasionally for tourists. Today, it sits rusting in the train yard.

Though the train station may appear broken down and desolate, Paranapiacaba is not abandoned. Around 1,000 people live in the region, but many of the old homes are empty. The village is divided into "upper" and "lower" halves by the train tracks. Vila Portuguesa lays further up the mountain, and as the name suggests, is more Portuguese in architectural style.

Downhill sits Vila Martim Smith, where the employees of the railway formerly lived in bunkhouses and small cottages. This is where the Museo Tecnológico Ferroviário sits in an old railway building. The museum exhibits all the technological achievements of the British railway in Brazil, including displays of the 19th century train equipment. The train station is also open for visitors to explore. Although the trains don't run anymore, the station is anything but dead: The industrial tracks, buildings, and equipment are being taken over by lush natural growth.

In the center of the arid Nevada desert, on a stretch of road where attractions are hard to find, travelers on Nevada Highway 447 will come across a black roadside sign featuring a large, mysterious "X.” Just when you were thinking that the flat desert couldn’t look any more extraterrestrial, Planet X Pottery proves you wrong.

Easy to miss but well-deserving of a roadside stop, Planet X Pottery near Gerlach, Nevada is an intergalactic oasis filled with fine china. Its electricity is generated entirely by the hot, beaming sun of the Black Rock and Smoke Creek Deserts. The solar-powered ceramics emporium features an active pottery studio and four show galleries that the owners, ex-hippies John and Rachel Bogard, promise are out of this world.

Built in 1974 out of an abandoned California Trail homestead, Planet X Pottery has been selling porcelain, stoneware, and Raku products for over four decades. Also found at Planet X is an old-fashioned wooden saloon, complementing the alien-themed art galleries with Wild Western comforts. The outer space appeal is truly stellar.

At the intersection of Kaohsiung’s Red and Orange metro lines, the history of the universe plays out on giant dome of illuminated glass. Built by Italian artist Narcissus Quagliata, the Dome of Light also commemorates the harrowing birth of Taiwan’s democracy.

Despite its location at Kaohsiung’s busiest metro stop, the Dome of Light holds the solemnity of a cathedral. The dome is an impressive 30 meters (98 feet) in diameter and is made of 4,500 glass panels, making it the largest work of glass art in the world. The installation took Quagliata four and a half years to complete and has led some to call Formosa Boulevard one of the world’s most beautiful subway stations.

Each of the dome's four quadrants highlights themes from the lifecycle of the cosmos, humanity, and Taiwan’s own tumultuous political history. The imagery moves through periods of painful growth and inevitable destruction, but the overall message echoes with hope and rebirth.

Although Taiwan is now considered one of the most legitimate democracies in Asia (second only to Japan and South Korea), its political history is defined by violence and oppression under a one-party state. Beginning with the February 28 massacre in 1947, a 38-year period of martial law saw tens of thousands of political dissidents imprisoned or executed.

Things began to shift on December 10, 1979, when a pro-democracy demonstration and celebration of Human Rights Day descended into police-instigated violence. The events of the protest helped unite government opposition and marked a turning point in Taiwan’s democratization. Known as the Formosa Incident, the protests took place near the present-day Formosa Boulevard Station where the Dome of Light is installed.

At street level, the Formosa Boulevard Station is just as remarkable. The four main entrances were designed by Japanese architect Shin Takamatsu. Their curved shape and orientation towards one another is thought to be symbolic of hands clasped in prayer—perhaps seeking redemption for the past or wishing for continued peace in the future. 

In late January of 1922, a blizzard swept through the mid-Atlantic region of the United States. Over the course of three days more than two feet of snow fell over the region. Washington, D.C., was hit especially hard by the storm, tallying 28 inches of snowfall, the all-time record. Yet despite this, on January 28th, somewhere between 300 and 1,000 people trudged through the snow and crowded into the Knickerbocker Theatre to see the silent movie Get-Rich-Quick Wallingford. 

The Knickerbocker was the newest and one of the most fashionable theaters in the city, having opened in 1917. It was designed by Reginald Geare, an architect making a name for himself building upscale cinemas for the movie-going Americans of the "roaring '20s."

At around 9 p.m, just as the opening credits were rolling, a crack split across the ceiling and pieces of plaster rained onto the audience. Moments later, before it even occurred to anyone to evacuate, the roof caved in. Snow poured in from the roof onto the mezzanine, which crumbled under the weight and crashed onto the orchestra below. As one reporter put it, it was "as sudden as turning off an electric light."

People from around the Adams Morgan attempted to pull victims from the rubble but it wasn't until 600 soldiers stationed across the city reached the scene that an organized rescue effort began. Fire trucks and ambulances attempting to reach the theater were delayed navigating icy roads clogged with abandoned vehicles stuck in snow. Rescuers were still working to sift through the rubble and the bodies in it by mid-afternoon the next day.

In total 98 people died and 133 were injured in the theater collapse, making it the deadliest disaster in Washington, D.C. history. The wreckage from the catastrophe was compared to that of World War I battlefields, and the blizzard that caused it all was dubbed the "Knickerbocker Storm."

An investigation blamed the collapse on faulty construction and design. Architect Geare and four of his employees were indicted with manslaughter by a grand jury, but none were ever convicted. None of the survivors or the families of the deceased received any financial settlement despite numerous lawsuits. The collapse of the Knickerbocker Theatre effectively snuffed out Geare's rising star, and he committed suicide in 1927. Guilt wore heavily on theater's owner Harry Crandall too, and he took his own life a decade later.

The Knickerbocker was replaced by the Ambassador Theater, which operated until 1968. Today, one would never guess this was the site of a D.C. tragedy. A bank operates on the site, and no plaque or memorial commemorates the lives lost there.

The Isle of Wight, off Britain's southern coast, is known mostly as a popular destination for vacationers.

And, apparently, some sheep.

Police on the island reported yesterday that 60 sheep mysteriously appeared near the hamlets of Hale Common and Horringford, according to the Isle of Wight County Press.

"We are fairly sure there's around sixty," the police wrote on Twitter. "They are a little too quick to count fully though."

The police kept tweeting, appealing to the public for any information. No solid leads came, even if they did get some jokes. 

"Looks like the farmer has been fleeced," @bruno1cat tweeted, along with others tweeting a lot of bad puns that include the word "ewe."

But today, the police reported that the sheep were gone, having left just as quickly as they appeared. This time, the police came armed with hashtags.

#sheepgate part 2 .... the sheep have mysteriously disappeared over night.... please keep yours eyes open ! #sheepmystery

— IOWight Police (@IOWightPolice) February 8, 2017

#sheepgate. 

Vila Maria Zélia was the first model village in Brazil. Inaugurated in 1917, it was the brainchild of the industrialist Jorge Street, built to house the workers of the Companhia Nacional de Tecidos da Juta, a jute sack factory.

The architect in charge of the project based it on early 20th century European cities. The village was like a small city in itself, with two schools (one for boys and one for girls), grocery store, a church and other facilities for the workers and their families.

Due to economic problems in the 1920s and 1930s, the company declared bankruptcy, and Vila Maria Zélia came under the custody of the Brazilian federal government. Since then, some of the buildings, such as the schools, have been closed down and abandoned. The church is still in use, however, and there are still 200 houses in use by some 600 people living in the village.

The first thing any St Andrews student learns is to not step on the "PH" set in stone outside the busy entrance to St. Salvator's Quadrangle. A misstep could result in failing exams or, if a final year student, the loss of your entire degree.

Who would bring such bad luck to hardworking university students? Patrick Hamilton was an influential abbot at St Andrews who brought the reformist teachings of Martin Luther to Scotland. Because these teachings were heretical at the time, the archbishop sentenced him to death in 1528. Hamilton was burnt at the stake outside St Salvator's chapel and the University quadrangle. 

The fire burned for an agonizing six hours. During this time, Patrick Hamilton is said to have unleashed a curse on the future students of St Andrews who set foot in the place where he burned. His initials were set in stone in honor of his martyrdom (and perhaps as a warning not to step there). If you look up at the wall over the entrance to the Quadrangle, you can see Patrick Hamilton's face glaring out from a stone above the arch. 

A residential community in Hanahan, South Carolina, just outside of Charleston, has a new denizen—an alligator of an unusual orange color.

Neighbors spotted the alligator and posted its picture on Facebook.

There are many animals that come in surprising, bright colors—the pink grasshoppers and blue lobsters of the world. But orange alligators are likely not born that way. In 2011, an orange alligator appeared in Venice, Florida, and was crowned the world's first orange alligator. At the time, a Florida Fish and Wildlife representative told The Christian Science Monitor that the color likely came "from paint, stain, iron oxide or some other element in the environment that has left a coating on the animal, making it appear orange."

Experts also suspect that the color of this newly found alligator comes from some environmental factor, rather than a genetic anomaly. One herpetologist speculated that algae could be the culprit; South Carolina's Alligator Program Coordinator believes iron oxide (a.k.a. rust) from a steel pipe could have colored the alligator. 

This orange beast won't stay this way, though. Eventually it will shed its orange skin and turn back to its original color, likely an albino white.

Every kid who has ever climbed on a swing set has dreamt of swinging so hard that they loop right over the top, impressing everyone in attendance. Of course, often enough, this can lead to busted bones and bruised egos. Meanwhile in Estonia, thanks to a cultural love affair with swings, going over the top has developed into a serious extreme sport.

Kiiking, as the sport of extreme swinging is known ("kiik" is "swing" in Estonian), is fairly young, having first been introduced in the early 1990s, but it has deep roots in Estonia’s cultural past. "Wooden swings are traditionally a big part of Estonian culture and all around Estonia you can find different wooden swings (they are called 'village swings') where all the people from surrounding places came together during celebrations or just to have fun while swinging and singing," says Raili Laansalu, a kiiker since she was just 8 years old, and whose family currently runs the premiere website for the sport, Kiiking.com. To this day, communal wooden swings can be found in towns and villages across the country, so it’s perhaps no wonder that some Estonian daredevil would be the one to invent a way to go over the top.

Sending one of those large village swings 360 degrees around its spindle is possible, but as with any standard swing, people would reliably injure themselves in the effort. Then in 1993, a man named Ado Kosk created a pair of wooden swings for the express purpose of going all the way around. They were simple levers with a pair of wooden rods attached to a flat seat on one end, and swinging spindle at the top. Early proto-kiikers would tie their feet to the seats of Kosk’s swings and thrust their body back and forth to gain momentum until they sent themselves all the way around.

As Laansalu tells it, a man named Tarmo Männigo attempted an arc over the spindle of both of Kosk’s swings. Männigo was able to conquer the first swing, which stood about 2.5 meters tall, but when he attempted to swing around the second, which stood slightly taller, at 2.7 meters tall, he couldn’t quite get over. It became clear that the taller the swing got, the more difficult it would be to complete a circuit over the spindle, which meant that there could be competitive accomplishments, and thus, a new sport was born. “We, who are kiikers so to say, like to say that “kiiking” starts when your legs are higher than your head, before that it is just swinging,” says Laansalu.   

By 1997 Kosk had continued to refine his vision of kiiking as a pastime, and he invented a telescoping metal swing that could be raised and lowered safely, to allow for variable skill levels. The design has continued to be refined over the years, and the height of the swings increased. The spindly metal forks and system of support wires of modern kiiking swings are a far cry from Kosk’s original rustic inventions.

It would be a stretch to say that kiiking has become a major sporting event—there is no international tournament or anything more than small local clubs. Even in Estonia, Laansalu says that while most people know a kiiking swing when they see one, even the locals are a bit lost as to the competitive rules.              

At least in Estonia, where kiiking is most popular, the rules of competition are regulated by the Estonian Kiiking Union (Eesti Kiikingi Liit). Kiikers set a certain height for the swing that they will then have the chance to try and round using just the momentum from their body. Should they swing all the way around at the stated height, they can try to go higher. “[For example], I set my first height at 4 meters. I make one spindle so I am allowed to choose a new height. For next one I choose 4.20 meters. I also complete that so I choose now 4.50 meters. If I do not complete 4.50m, my end result will be 4.20m,” says Laansalu. The competitor who can flip around the highest swing wins. According to Guinness World Records, the current champion kiiker cleared a 7.15 meter swing in 2015.

Before you assume that just vigorously swinging like an insane school kid will get you over the top, Laansalu says that you’d better be in top physical form if you want to be competitive, citing footballers, rowers, and roller-skaters (because Estonia is delightful) as prime candidates for the sport. It takes a lot of arm and leg strength, as well as solid technique to master the perfect timing of when to stand, when to sit, and when to thrust to complete a 360. This is swinging for the Red Bull set.

Kiiking has gained some popularity outside of Estonia. Small groups and local teams have begun popping up from Germany to the U.S., but it is still considered mostly an Estonian sport. For Laansalu, kiiking has been a part of her life since she was a child. “I started doing kiiking when I was 8 years-old, when my father bought us our first kiiking swing,” she says. She continued competitive kiiking until she was 15, when she stopped competing after moving abroad. Still, she dreams of besting her own kiiking record. “My record until today is 4.83 meters,” she says. “Though, I still secretly hope that one day I will get back to it, like I used to, and I will do my 5 meter!”

Thanks to Theodore Roosevelt, the United States Congress passed the Antiquities Act of 1906, giving the office of the president the power to create National Monuments. Although that ability has changed by legislation over time, Teddy bullishly took on the task and picked the first monuments that same year, including Montezuma Castle in Camp Verde, Arizona.

This cliff dwelling is remarkably intact for a structure nearly a thousand years old, and naming the site for Montezuma reveals an error in the early archeology of the site: It wasn’t built by Aztecs, but by the indigenous Sinagua, the pre-Columbian people who lived in the Verde Valley of central Arizona.

Like an early apartment building, the structure is comprised of five stories and 20 rooms, carved from the nearly vertical limestone cliff face. Rising 90 feet from the valley floor, it could only be accessed by ladders, which, when pulled away, provided safety for the tribe from any intruder—man or beast—with unsavory motives.

There was a time when visitors were permitted inside to have a look around, but limestone is soft, and thousands of stomping feet are destructive, so within a few years of its protected status as a National Monument, the public was kept out, in order to preserve it. But even from down below, it’s an extraordinary site.

Last Monday, a seven-year-old bobcat named Ollie snuck out of her cage at the National Zoo and began roaming the streets of Washington, D.C. She quickly gained an empathetic fan club and a Twitter account. When she was recaptured, near the zoo's birdhouse, it only heightened her relatability. "We're all Ollie the Bobcat, aren't we?" asked Petula Dvorak in the Washington Post.

Animals escape zoos every year. Although many are urged on by adoring crowds, most (except the flamingos) are eventually caught. But there's at least one mammal that stayed loose, and has inspired fellow-feeling, zookeeper lore, and art for over a century—the black panther from the Bronx Zoo.

"It's a very accurate allegory for nowadays," says Ido Michaeli, an artist who recently designed a tapestry based on the panther's tale.

On a sunny July day in 1902, a seven-month-old panther arrived at the Bronx Zoo, a gift from the Mexican Zoological Society. Unable to move him into his permanent cage immediately, keepers left him overnight in his transit container, a slatted wooden box. "There had been no thought of the panther's teeth in the building of the prison," wrote the New York Times the next day. By 10:00 the next morning, he had gnawed a hole in the box and waltzed out.

For the next several hours, the Times reported, all of the Bronx was in thrall to this panther. The keepers came out in full force, with nets and chains, and passers-by who were lucky enough to spot the animal gawked as he leaped from chestnut tree to chestnut tree. "Picnic parties were all up and making for spots of safety," the Times wrote. The panther snacked on the leftovers, and even in this, reporters gave him the celebrity treatment: "He Eats Sandwiches and a Ham for Lunch," the dek of the Times article read, "but Balks at Pie."

After a day of entertaining the crowds and and teasing his would-be captors, the panther finally made for the northern end of the Bronx Botanical Gardens, which was overgrown and jungly. From there, as his pursuers prepared for a final push, he leapt into the Bronx River. "It splashed into the water, and then they saw it swimming, with fine, vigorous strokes, which in a couple of seconds took it to the opposite shore," wrote the Times. "Then the figure shook itself, looked back as if in triumph, and walked slowly into the jungle again."

It's difficult to hear this story without feeling some of that triumph yourself. But when Michaeli first came across it, he heard something else echoing in the panther's tale—political allegory. "It was like a prison escape or a runaway slave," he says. "The wild animal was taken from his natural habitat and put in a cage, and he struggled until he managed to liberate himself … All of these stories and metaphors came across my mind."

Michaeli makes all kinds of art—stained glass, postage stamps, garden installations—but lately he's been interested in tapestry. For this newest piece, Black Panther Got Loose From the Bronx Zoo, now on display at the American Jewish Historical Society, he transformed the story of the panther's gambit into a hand-woven tableau, in which the story turns the form on its head.

"In the past, tapestry reflected the view of the rich and powerful," he explains. Your average wall hanging would depict, say, noblemen taking down a stag that's helpless in the face of their will. In his tapestry, Michaeli strove for the opposite effect. "This time, the natural and the wild enters the urban environment, the streets of the Bronx, challenging the established order," he says. The panther, snarling, has his paw up on a fire hydrant. Perched on horses, the policemen and zookeepers resemble princes of old—one has his megaphone tilted like a hunting horn—but they're far from capturing their quarry.

Michaeli's visual retelling of the escape is somewhat embroidered. The Times article it was based on doesn't mention firemen or police going after the animal, just hapless zookeepers. And the panther in question was not the black panther used as a symbol by the storied activist party, but more likely a jaguarundi, a smaller, brownish-gray species from Central America.

But—as we've learned from Ollie—animal escapes are, in the end, made of human dreams. And none of it matters to the panther, who, we can all hope, lived out a long, strange, free life in the Bronx.

It was a sad thing to lose—a fluorescent torrent of red-hot lava pouring from the side of a rocky cliff, accompanied by billowing acid steam and leaping bits of rock. 

But even the greatest performers can't resist an encore. As the New York Times reports, after a brief hiatus, Hawaii's 61g lava flow—which had entertained spectators, thrill-seekers, geologists for a straight month until it stopped last week—is back and better than ever.

The 61g lava flow, which has earned the nickname "the fire hose," is pouring out of Hawaii's Kilauea Volcano. This volcano, which last erupted 34 years ago, is constantly sending leftover lava through tubes and into the ocean. But it's rare that a dispensary is as visible, and as long-lasting, as this guy—usually, the lava cools and piles until it builds into a delta and stops itself up, experts told the Times.

61g was first discovered on New Year's Eve, when a massive chunk of rock collapsed and exposed the stream to public view. Thousands of visitors flocked to the site to watch the gush. But the fun ended last Thursday, when a massive chunk of cliff collapsed, obscuring the torrent, Hawaii News Now reported.

Now, thanks to another collapse, it's back and better than ever. In a clip by Big Island Video News, fans on a tour boat film as it vomits its scarlet bile into the ocean. May it do so for eternity.

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.

Fenced off in the corner of Washington, D.C.'s National Arboretum you can find the dilapidated ruins of the United Brick Corporation kilns. A quiet and forgotten lot today, this brickyard used to bustle with activity and is linked with several notable projects across the nation's capital.

Brick production at the location began in 1909. At the time, brick-making was very labor intensive and it was hard to ship the bricks far from where they were made. As a result, there were close to 100 brickyards across Washington.

At this brickyard, clay was sourced from dredgers operating out of the nearby Anacostia River. The clay was then mixed with water and sand and cut into the proper shape. They were heated in large kilns for several days and then allowed to cool for several more before they were shipped out.

The brickyard changed hands several times over the following decades, eventually being bought by the United Brick Corporation in 1930. They expanded the complex and built the distinctive, round “beehive” kilns you see today. This brickyard became one of the largest and most successful in the District. Bricks from here supplied the construction of apartment complexes, the New Executive Office Building, the Court of Claims, renovations to the Pension Building (now the National Building Museum), and the National Cathedral. By 1966 the United Brick Corporation was shipping out 145,000 bricks per day.

By the early 1970s, however, the beehive kilns couldn't keep pace with the output of more technologically advanced kilns. United Brick closed in 1972 and the land and structures were annexed into the adjacent National Arboretum. The brickyard was added to the National Register of Historic Places and there were plans to renovate the structures for the purpose of teaching the history of brick-making, but without the money to restore the facility it was fenced off and has become overgrown.