The "Museo Inacabado de Arte Urbano," or "MIAU," has no walls, doors, or admission fee. Calling it an outdoor museum doesn't exactly sum it up either–the museum is housed on the streets of Fanzara, an otherwise peaceful and quiet mountainside town.
MIAU is called "unfinished" because it is constantly changing. Artists from around the world travel to Fanzara to adorn the old-fashioned houses with their futuristic art. Most pieces are psychedelic murals depicting robots, giant cats, aliens, beautiful cyborg women, and other oddities. There are also installations: antique chairs jutting out from one wall like exposed rebar; or colorful cars flattened against another facade. Bright and obvious works of art are mixed in with more subtle, hidden ones, and there is something interesting just around every corner.
The Unfinished Museum of Urban Art has brought new life to Fanzara. In addition to art lovers of all kinds, students from grade school all the way up to fine arts institutions visit the town to attend workshops and film screenings. The residents of Fanzara take part in creating and maintaining the art as well, and it's not uncommon to find a hip muralist in a face mask being assisted by several spraypaint-wielding abuelas.
By all external appearances, the walls of the dome on the U.S. Capitol building are a solid marble edifice. But the shell is actually hollow, made out of metal (painted white), and supported like an iron-framed skyscraper. The tight space between the exterior facade and the interior walls contains a stairwell with 365 steps.
Up at the tip-top of the dome the stairs lead to a small room known as the Tholus. This circular lookout spot is the vertical projection you see in between the circular bit of the dome and the Statue of Freedom. The government has released several photos over the years from the Tholus looking out, but there’s only one mysterious photo floating around (from Wikimedia, of all places) that shows the interior of the Tholus. Based on architectural drawings from the 1860’s it’s a simple affair, but it would still be interesting to catch a glimpse.
The familiar present-day structure is actually the Capitol building’s second dome. The original so-called Bulfinch Dome was smaller, made of wood and clad with copper. Work began on the second, more vertically gifted dome in 1855 and was completed in 1863 during the American Civil War. Iron was selected as the building material because it was fireproof, as well as cheaper and lighter than stone.
The interior was once open to the public, but according to the U.S. Capitol Historical Society, “so many persons collapsed and had to be carried down, and so much trash was tossed below, that the area was closed.”
Building 98 opened in 1911 as the bachelor's club for the US Army's Fort D. A. Russell. The fort was built to secure the United States' border with Mexico during the Mexican Revolution, but remained useful throughout World War I and World War II. Building 98 remained the place for soldiers to kick back and relax.
Fort D. A. Russell expanded during WWII, as Air Force and Army recruits were trucked in to be trained at the Marfa Army Airfield (above which the mysterious Marfa Lights can be seen). The fort was also the holding site of some 200 German prisoners of war, two of whom were tasked with an unusual job: painting a mural in Building 98's officers club.
The two POWs selected for this job were Hans Jürgen Press and Robert Humpel, both artists. After being released from Fort D. A. Russell and returning to Europe, Press even went on to have a prolific career as an illustrator for children's books.
Their mural was based on the dusty Texan landscapes they saw around them. It depicted scenes from Western films the artists had seen back in Germany–covered wagons, cowboys on horseback, and spiny saguaros abound–despite the fact that these were nowhere to be found around Marfa.
Fort D. A. Arthur closed following WWII. It lay empty for years until artist Donald Judd purchased and transformed it into the revolutionary Chinati Foundation. Building 98, on the other hand, has remained exactly as the officers and POWs left it. It is now the home of the International Woman's Foundation, which continues the building's artistic legacy by staging expositions of work from experienced female artists.
It might seem impossible that the precise lines of an entire book could be done by hand, but the Mackenzie & Harris Type foundry, established in 1915, finds that the old-fashioned method needs no perfecting.
The M & H Type foundry continues to make physical fonts the old-fashioned way, by pouring them out of red hot metal. Located in San Francisco's beautiful Presidio, the foundry shares a roof with one of the most vintage typesetters, Arion Press, and you can get a tour of the printing process from start to finish.
Founded in 1961, Arion made its name publishing Beat-era books and classics printed in period-authentic type. Today, it publishes three to four new books each year, in limited editions, using letterpress and custom illustrations all with zero computer involvement. A gallery in the lobby showcases some of the recent and older books and prints. A public tour is even more interesting: Visitors are walked through the typesetting area where you can see vintage presses, rollers, and letters being strung together to form words, and then whole pages.
Further along, tours descend to the basement to see the alchemical process of actually making the individual letters out of the foundry. The tour ends where the bookmaking process does, when the paper is inspected and the volumes are bound.
There are more than 5,000 minerals in the world—naturally occurring chemical compounds that are stable at room temperature and have a unique chemical formula. But, as Scientific American reports, humans are rapidly adding to that number. In a new report in American Mineralogist, a team of scientists reports that they found 208 new minerals that would never have occurred without humans and thousands more mineral-like compounds that humans have created.
“There is nothing at all like this in the geology of the past 4.5 billion years on Earth,” one geologist told Scientific American.
The new minerals, SciAm reports, formed in conditions created only by humans—in man-made mines with unnatural humidity or in shipwrecks deep on the ocean floor.
Humans have also added thousands of new chemical compounds, many more than were created in the “Great Oxidation Event,” a period that lasted two billion years, when the increase in the supply of oxygen created thousands of oxides.
The compounds that humans have created will change the geological record forever: our most lasting legacy may be in the ground. Like the holes and tunnels humans have created, the earth’s strata will show marks of our presence long after we’re gone. SciAm:
The Washington Monument, for example, will eventually be a lens-shaped pocket composed of limestone where no other limestone is found. And the pocket that was once the Smithsonian will contain so many rare minerals that they could not possibly have formed so close together in nature.
Which means that whoever inherits the Earth will have more than a few geological mysteries to solve.
After I wrote about “jawn,” the all-purpose noun that’s embedded in the culture of Philadelphia, I started getting emails telling me about a similar, and maybe even wilder, term native to a small group of isolated islands nearly 5,000 miles away. Hawaii’s “da kine” is not only an all-purpose noun, capable of standing in for objects, events, and people: it’s also a verb, an adjective, an adverb, and a symbol of Hawaiian people and the unique way they speak. It may be the most versatile phrase on the planet.
To understand da kine, you first have to understand exactly what language modern Hawaiians speak, which is not nearly as simple as you might think. There are several languages co-existing on the Hawaiian islands: Hawaiian, the Polynesian language of the original Hawaiians that’s experienced a renaissance of late; English, brought to the archipelago by American imperialism; the various languages brought by immigrant workers, including Japanese, Filipino, Portuguese, and Spanish; and something which is now called Hawaiian Pidgin. It’s the last of these that brings us da kine.
A pidgin, which is not capitalized, is a form of communication that arises when multiple groups of people need to talk with each other, but do not have a language in common, and for whatever reason choose not to, or are not able to, teach each other their native languages. They are not considered full languages, in that they generally have limited and simplified grammar and vocabulary. Basically, pidgins are tools: you have to speak to somebody, but you can’t use either your own language or the other person’s language, so you come up with this basic system to get your point across.
The majority of pidgins tend to mine the vocabulary of the ruling class’s language for words. In Hawaii, as well as in the Caribbean and other places, that language was English. In Hawaii, immigrants from Japan, the Philippines, Korea, and China all came to work the plantations, but their only option for communication was to create an English pidgin. “This is partially done purposely,” says Kent Sakoda, who teaches a class on pidgin at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. “They don't want people to be able to organize. So you separate them, and one of the ways you do that is by language.”
The various Asian immigrant groups were separated in lodging, but still worked together in the fields, so had to come up with a way to talk. The solution was a pidgin, using English words the workers heard from their bosses. English is the “lexifier” in this case, meaning English lends the words to the pidgin. So this form of pidgin would be “English-lexified.”
But here’s the thing: Hawaiian Pidgin—note the capitalization—is not a pidgin, not anymore. It’s a creole.
Pidgins often have a limited lifespan. Maybe the isolated groups figure out a way to teach each other their native languages, or they just learn the lexifier language. A pidgin is, by definition, not a primary form of communication; pidgins are tools, but they’re sort of blunt tools, not capable of the kind of complexity that all humans need to communicate. But sometimes something weird happens: the pidgin begins to grow. The children of the immigrants who created the pidgin add to it. In a generation or two, the pidgin isn’t a tool alongside a native language: it is the native language. And at that point it’s called a creole.
“A creole has to do everything for its speakers that any language would do for any speaker. So it has to be more precise and more complex,” says Sakoda. “When it becomes a native language, it's a full-blown language, a language of great complexity, like any other language in the world.” By the 1920s, Hawaiian pidgin wasn’t a pidgin, it was a creole, but the name, despite its inaccuracy, has stuck. Today it’s capitalized, which goes a little way to indicate that Hawaiian Pidgin is more than a standard pidgin. What it is is a full language.
Hawaiian Pidgin today is made up of largely English-derived words, with some words from the various languages of the Hawaiian immigrants and the native Hawaiians, in a structure that’s sort of like English, sort of like other creoles, and contains some syntax from various Asian languages. It is not really mutually intelligible with English; sometimes an English speaker might understand enough words to kind of get the gist of a Hawaiian Pidgin sentence, but that’s true of, say, a native Spanish speaker listening to Italian, too. What makes a creole so confounding is that many of the words may have originated from another language, but have taken on totally new or different meanings. Even if, as an English speaker, you think you recognize and understand a Hawaiian Pidgin word, you might not really be getting it.
Da kine is one of these. It originally comes from the English “the kind,” possibly relating to the meaning of that English word as “kind of,” or “type of.” But there are not that many instances where you can replace da kine with “the kind” and have any idea what a Hawaiian Pidgin speaker is saying.
The most popular use of da kine is a similar one to jawn, in that it’s a stand-in for another word, kind of like “whatchamacallit.” But there’s an added social meaning to that use of da kine. “When people use da kine, the expectation is that the other person will be able to recover what is meant,” says Sakoda. “The implication is that you know each other well enough that the person using da kine will not have to explain it. There's even an understanding that the other person will not ask what is meant by da kine.” There’s an intimacy to the use of da kine that you don’t really get from “whatchamacallit.”
That intimacy also comes with a darker side. Sakoda gave me an example of saying, “She’s so da kine,” which could mean, in the right context, something negative: she’s mean, she talks too much, that kind of thing. When da kine is used as an adjective like that, Sakoda says he thinks the meaning can often veer negative, but there’s a reason for that. “If it's negative, you don't want to say it,” he says. “You're talking about somebody else—we say here, you're talking stink about somebody else—and you don't want to be responsible for saying that. So da kine is sort of like, it's your interpretation, and if I get called on it, well, I didn't say it!”
There are plenty of circumstances in which using da kine as a stand-in isn’t necessarily because you’ve forgotten what you want to say. Instead, it’s because, well, you don’t want to say what you have to say. Here’s another: “Don’t get sloppy with me, before I da kine you.” What does that mean? Well, nothing good, but maybe you don’t want to go on the record making a specific threat. So pull out the trusty da kine.
This isn’t to say that da kine is always negative, nor that, really, it has to have “da” in front of it. You could describe someone as “a smart kine people,” or tell your kid to “make sure you da kine before we go” (referring to doing a chore), or explain where someone went by saying “he wen da kine dem” (referring to going with somebody’s family, or friends, or whatever makes the most sense in context). Sometimes you can get clues: the word “stay,” in Hawaiian Pidgin, indicates an ongoing action. If you say “I stay eat lunch,” that means, basically, “I am eating lunch,” with no need for the -ing ending that English uses. If you talk about a woman, and you say she’s “stay da kine,” that often means, says Sakoda, that the woman is pregnant.
Where things get tricky with Hawaiian Pidgin is figuring out what even is Pidgin and what’s more like a dialect of English. With the continued presence of native English speakers—hard to avoid given that Hawaii is an American state—the line between Pidgin and English can sometimes be blurred, or not fully understood. Sakoda says that he often has to point out to his students when they’re using an English-derived word in its American English sense versus its Pidgin meaning.
Take the word “never.” In English, if you were to say “I never go to Las Vegas,” that would be interpreted as meaning “at no point in the past or future do I go to Las Vegas.” There’s a permanence to the English meaning of “never.” In Hawaiian, not so much. “In Pidgin, it's just a past negative, meaning ‘didn't,’” says Sakoda. “So it could mean ‘this year I didn't go to Vegas.’” In Pidgin, that use of the word “never—spelled “nevah”—would often be followed by a time period to clarify that. “I nevah go Las Vegas this year,” say. Someone with a keen ear might pick out the differences in meaning between the English “never” and the Pidgin “nevah,” but even the speaker may not realize he or she is speaking one rather than the other. Pidgin’s coexistence with English makes it tricky to tell if someone is bilingual; the overlap between Hawaiian Pidgin and Hawaiian English is fluid and ever-changing. It’s not as simple as switching from Spanish to English.
There is a perception of all pidgins that they are broken or incorrect versions of a language. That’s not usually too much of a problem, since a pidgin is a supplementary tool. But in Hawaii, where Hawaiian Pidgin is not actually a pidgin but a native language, the perception that this language is a bad form of English is a dangerous one. “There's a stigma attached to the Pidgin that's spoken here,” says Sakoda. "So there's kind of a social or educational force to lose the Pidgin and to speak so-called ‘better English.’”
Sakoda thinks Hawaiian Pidgin, thanks to those forces and the continual presence of English, is making Pidgin more English-like. But it won’t necessarily stay that way. There are plenty of creoles and even English dialects that begin at some point to further extricate themselves from the lexifier language. (This has happened, to some extent and in some communities, with AAVE, better known as Black English Vernacular.) Maybe speakers of Hawaiian Pidgin don’t want to be associated with mainland American English, want to use their language as an identity marker of themselves as Hawaiian. If that was to happen, the trend could reverse: Pidgin could begin to lose some of its similarities to English. Whether or not that happens, though, da kine isn’t going anywhere.
The Ahlin family, of Santaquin, Utah, isn't sure what they're going to name their new baby. They don't know the baby's hair color or eye color, and they've chosen not to ask about their biological sex.
But after the baby's latest ultrasound, there's one thing the family knows: that kid is metal as heck.
As Fox 13 News reports, Makelle and Jared Ahlin were looking through ultrasound images of their soon-to-be third child when they spotted one in which the fetus was throwing up a classic set of "devil horns" with their right hand.
Makelle and Jared have two other children, who Jared described as "very active." "It probably sounds like they will fit into the family," Jared said of the newest addition.
The rockin' baby is due near the end of June, which gives the rest of us some time to prepare.
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.
We may never get to see the uproarious hijinks of 1991’s comedy classic, King Ralph, but, thankfully, reality is often stranger than fiction. Take, for example, a Colorado man who believes that the works of J.R.R. Tolkien are “more than fiction” and has formally laid his claim to the title of King of England.
As spotted by David Mapstone, a journalist at Britain's Sky News, Allan V. Evans of Wheat Ridge, Colorado, took out a lengthy ad in The Times of London on Wednesday claiming that due to his unbroken lineage—trailing back to the fictional Kingdom of Gondor, he says—makes him the rightful King of England. In the ad, Evans traces his ancestry through real historical kings such as Cunedda Wledig, founder of Wales, before finally arriving at where he appears to think history intersects with the stories of Tolkien, Wales being just a new name for what was once called Gondor.
An American has taken out a big ad in the Times to say he's the rightful king & intends to seize power. pic.twitter.com/ba1iQUyGer
Evans goes on to state that in 30 days from the post of the notice, he will be claiming his rightful lands, titles, assets, and all the rest, but will also wait until the natural death of Queen Elizabeth II.
The ad ends with a rousing call to his cause and countrymen, before the revealing final line, making any previous fictional reference explicit.
"For the legend was not a myth but was indeed true," the ad says, "and more than a mere Tolkien story, that the men of the West are now returning and now is the time of the return of the King."
A brick church tower along coastal Zeeland in the Netherlands is all that remains of a town lost to the sea. The tower is the keeper of story of a trapped mermaid, her frantic merman husband, and their curse on a 16th century community.
The story of the tower might end with a storm, a failed dike, and a changing coastline, but for the Plompe toren (or “squat tower”) the story has a twist: Inside is a 360˚ illustrated panorama that tells of a mermaid caught in a fishing net, and the curse her merman husband placed on the town.
The Netherlands has long relied on elaborate engineering to hold back the sea. This is especially true in Zeeland (Sealand), the collection of islands and peninsulas in the far west of the country. At the end of the 15th century the coast around the once-prosperous fishing village of Koudekerke looked much different than today, with the seashore nearly two miles (3 km) further out into the Oosterschelde (the estuary).
Fierce storms plagued the coast, and the dike failed, swallowing up the town. Anything that was left was torn down, with the exception of the Plompe toren. Legend says, however, that the tower was left behind as a cautionary reminder.
The story varies, but basically goes like this: one day a fishing boat caught a beautiful mermaid in its net. The mermaid’s husband (a merman) tried frantically to get the fishermen to let her go, but to no avail. They brought her back to shore as a prize to show off, where she slowly withered and died, leaving her distraught merman (and sometimes even a mer-baby, depending on the narrator) behind. Seething with anger and vengeance, the merman placed a curse on the town, and it was that very night that the storm hit, taking the town out to sea.
The Plompe toren was sparred, but only as a reminder of the destruction of this once-prosperous community, and a beacon to the fishermen in the Oosterschelde of the result of their cruelty to the beautiful sea-family.
Dwarf beech trees are not ordinary trees. Found in a forest near Reims, France, in the summer they look like green igloos, or large turtles, or something out of The Little Prince. But instead of hiding elephants, these green, leafy mounds, ranging from 3 feet to 15 feet high, cover deformed trunks and gnarly branches that squirm and twist and zigzag like contortionists in repose. In winter, they look like the skeletal remains of mutant serpents that reach defiantly toward the sky as if to say, “You want a piece of me?”
Verzy, a small village 15 miles south of Reims, is home to the largest stand of Faux—an Old French word that means beech trees. But there are similar trees found elsewhere in France, as well as in Sweden, Denmark, and Germany. Les Faux de Verzy has about 800 of the trees, some believed to be over 300 years old.
No one's exactly sure how or why they grow the way they do. Scientists guess the mushroom-shaped specimens are a result of a genetic mutation, but the trees’ offspring are just as likely to be normal and straight as they are to be crooked. Other possible explanations for their odd traits include climate, chemicals, air currents, soil composition, telluric radiation, underground cavities, radioactive meteors, a virus—or perhaps a curse?
Perhaps not surprisingly, an intriguing web of legends and half-truths about these trees has developed over the centuries. They involve a cast of unlikely characters: a pious saint, Joan of Arc, monks, scientists, plus a few witches, trolls, townsfolk, and maybe even evil fairies.
In the case of Les Faux de Verzy in particular, some legends say that in olden times, the trees sheltered pagan deities, worshipped by the local townspeople. Saint Basel, a devout monk who lived in a monastery nearby, is said to have cursed the trees, causing them to twist like pretzels instead of soaring up toward heaven. Others say monks in the monastery became fond of Les Faux and cultivated them, using techniques such as layering—burying part of a low branch to start a new tree—to increase the number. Perhaps the monks gave the trees away to travelers, which would explain how they ended up growing elsewhere.
In the 1930s and ‘40s, people from Verzy and surrounding villages danced in the shadows of Les Faux at bacchanalian festivals, complete with orchestras and cases of champagne from nearby cellars. Michele Renoir, a local resident, recalls the trees provided natural hiding places, perfect for romantic dalliances, where couples would swoon under the enchanting spell of the branches—or maybe it was the champagne.
Others still whisper about witches and trolls who, in a frenzy late at night, might have twirled these trees into corkscrew shapes, just for the fun of it. One legend claims that Joan of Arc came to Les Faux de Verzy and climbed into a tree, letting its twisted branches embrace her young body.
Anatole France, author of The Life of Joan of Arc, tells the tale of how a similar tree figured in young Joan’s life. Her village of Domremy-la-Purcelle in Lorraine—where dwarf beech trees are also found today—was home to a “Fairy Tree,” whose low branches swept the ground. As a girl, Joan danced around the tree in springtime celebrations. Along with other young maidens, she hung the tree with garlands and wreaths, which would mysteriously disappear at night.
The townspeople of Joan’s era truly believed fairies lived in the tree. Once powerful, the fairies “had fallen long since from their powerful and high estate,” France writes, and were “as simple as the people among whom they lived.” Locals invited the fairies to baptisms and set a place for them at the dinner table. “Some were very kind,” writes France, but others cast evil spells. Given her famous demise at age 19, perhaps in her youth, poor Joan of Arc displeased a fairy.
Les Faux de Verzy are found in a remote area of Parc Naturel Régional de la Montagne de Reims and attract some 300,000 visitors per year. Lately, forest rangers are concerned about damage to the trees and have erected fences around many of them so tourists don’t trample on their fragile root system. In 2016, the park received the coveted designation of “Exceptional Forest” by the National Forests Office.
Nearby resident Nicole Quevy-Lefevre is a huge fan of Les Faux de Verzy and says the grove is a “garden of relaxation.” She and her husband, Paul, visit the trees several times a week, weather permitting. They have names for their favorites and mourn when one of the trees is damaged in a storm. But the trees are resilient, she says, and live for centuries. They are like “little crazy men,” as she puts it.
Quevy-Lefevre says her favorite season for enjoying the trees is in winter, when the snow provides stark contrast to gnarly dark branches. But no matter the time of year, a magical experience awaits at Les Faux de Verzy.
Yesterday, around 10:40 a.m. local time at London's Heathrow Airport, a British Airways flight to San Francisco was grounded for around four hours after the plane's crew announced there was a mouse on board.
For passengers, this created some consternation, and, of course, the opportunity to say something on social media that they thought was funny.
Just had my flight to SFO cancelled because of a mouse on board the plane. Could it not get a visa?? #britishairways
Nearly 11 years ago, Samuel L. Jackson starred in a movie titled Snakes on a Plane. You may have heard of it. At least one passenger on the plane with the mouse on it had heard of it as well, getting inspired enough to also make a joke, which referenced the movie Snakes on a Plane, the plot of which Rotten Tomatoes describes this way: "Forget terrorists or hijackers—there's a handful of deadly assassins aboard a jet liner and they don't even have arms or legs in this airborne thriller."
I'm going to sell this to the movies. It can be the slightly more pedestrian prequel to snakes on a plane. Maybe this is what lured them on?
According to the BBC, British Airways made a cheeky statement of their own on the matter, which came alongside some preening about how great British Airways is.
"We know almost everyone wants to fly with us to San Francisco, but on this occasion there was one very small customer who we had to send back to the gate," the airline said. "Everyone with two legs is now on their way to California, and we are sorry for the delay."
Nature is full of mystery, but none are as compelling at this very moment than why these turkeys are circling a dead cat.
As seen in a recently released video that has been spreading across the internet like overflowing gravy on a Thanksgiving plate, a group of turkeys was caught on tape walking in a nearly perfect circle around a deceased cat in the middle of the street. The person filming the strange behavior, which he tweeted, seems to be baffled by the birds’ conga line, but experts quoted across the internet seem to blame it on one thing: turkeys are kind of dumb.
An expert Gizmodo spoke with, posited that the birds were just curiously checking out a potential threat, and got locked in a hypnotic cycle of one bird following the tail of the one in front of it, unto infinity. Other turkey specialists, including ones quoted in The Verge, seem to have come to similar conclusions, saying they’d seen similar behavior in the turkeys before.
King Henry VIII may be most famous for ruthlessly beheading his wives, but he was also keen on rolling other spherical objects: namely, bowling balls. Henry VIII and his courtiers were known to be fans of lawn bowling, which involved tossing a “bowl” or ball across open lawns in royal gardens.
The Tudor-era bowling ball above, recently discovered in what used to be the moat of King John’s Court manor house thanks to digging work related to London's Crossrail project, is a remnant of one of the British monarchy’s favorite pastimes.
The English didn't invent bowling. The first precursor of the sport is said to date to the Egyptians and Romans, who would stuff leather balls with corn, as Roy Shephard notes in An Illustrated History of Health and Fitness. In England, historians trace the sport back to the late 13th century, as open greens or “bowling greens” became more of a common feature in gardens.
Bowling was just one of many sports that were played in these courts. During the early modern period, sport was typically reserved for elites and even governed by the monarchy. Games such as tennis, wrestling, jousting, and bowling were not only for physical fitness, but opportunities for dukes and lords to socialize and exhibit power.
“If used carefully, [sport] could propel a gentleman to the heart of power,” writes James Williams in the journal Sport in History. “For the early Tudor gentlemen, sport could be a ‘deadly serious game’ with an essential social and political role.”
Special structures and venues were an expense only the wealthy could afford. Henry VIII, an avid sportsman, attached a number of sporting venues to his palaces. Hampton Court, Nonsuch Palace, and Whitehall boasted tiltyards, cockpits, and bowling alleys. The complex at Whitehall was particularly elaborate, including four indoor tennis courts, a jousting yard, a cock-fighting and bear-baiting pit, and a bowling green.
There were many different types of lawn games that involved rolling a bowl and hitting a pin or cone, such as bocce and nine-pins. One of the earliest forms of bowling was a game called “cones,” in which two small cone-shaped objects were placed on two opposite ends, and players would try to roll their bowl as close as possible to the opponent’s cone. The game “kayles”—later called nine-pins—usually involved throwing a stick at a series of nine pins set up in a square formation, though sometimes players would roll a bowl instead. Similar to the ten-pin bowling commonly played today, bowlers would aim to knock down all the pins with the least number of throws. Sometimes, the game would feature a larger “king pin” in the center of the square. If that was knocked down, the player would automatically win the game.
Choosing the proper shape and type of bowl was important depending on the turf, as Joseph Strutt notes in The Sports and Pastimes of the People of England. Flat bowls were best for alleys, round biased bowls (a ball with a weight on one side) gave an advantage on open grounds, and round bowls were selected for greens that were plain and level.
The sport was widely popular. Local taverns arranged bowling matches in halls or the village green. Gambling was also common. One account in 1648 reported that Sir Edgar Hungerford had lost his entire estate while betting on a bowling match.
More than one British monarch tried to ban commoners and peasants from participating in bowling, along with other sports, arguing that they were a waste of time and encouraged gambling. In 1477, King Edward IV decreed that for commoners, playing sports was a finable offense:
“whosoever shall occupy a place of closh, kayles, half-bowle, hand-in, hand-out or queck board shall be three years imprisoned and forfeit £20, and he that will use any of the said games shall be two years imprisoned and forfeit £10.”
Similarly, in 1511, King Henry VIII tried to make the sport even more exclusive. He declared that bowling was illegal for common people, and that “no manner of Persons could at any time play at any Bowl or Bowls in Open Places out of his Garden or Orchard.” Those who broke the law would receive a statutory fine of six shillings and eight pence. Though according to Shephard, noblemen who owned property valued at more than £100 could obtain a “bowling license” to play. It would take centuries for these laws to be amended.
Object of Intrigue is a weekly column in which we investigate the story behind a curious item. Is there an object you want to see covered? Email ella@atlasobscura.com.
There's nothing like a visit to St Augustine’s Oldest Wooden Schoolhouse Museum to bring back memories of those carefree elementary school days of the 18th century: dunce caps, a privy out back, a schoolmaster living overhead... And a creepy Harry Potter-esque dungeon under the stairs, where they put kids who misbehaved.
This is what detention looked like 200 years ago.
Located in the Minorcan Quarter of St. Augustine, the original structure of the schoolhouse was one-room in a single-story, with an outhouse and detached kitchen. It first appeared on tax rolls as far back as 1716, but it didn't become a school until the first recorded owner got married and became the schoolmaster. With a new wife and kids to educate, the little cedar and cypress building was expanded to include a small upstairs living quarters.
Despite some features that now seem antiquated (like the dungeon and privy), in other ways the school was actually ahead of its time. It was the first to be co-ed in the United States, educating both boys and girls as early as 1788.
Since the mid-1930s the site has been a small museum, with displays of colonial life (including some spiffy animatronics), artifacts, early text books, and a never-completed Grove of Educators, an ambitious project intended to gather and showcase statues of educational pioneers from every country in the Americas (only a few countries participated).
Meanwhile, all these years poor Timmy has been stuck in that claustrophobic little dungeon–allegedly for biting–and maybe one day they'll let him out. He claims that he's "inocint," but even if he did commit the offense, after more than two centuries he's probably ready to behave himself by now.
In 1887, the Parsons family donated their private collection of books to Downside Abbey, a Benedictine monastery occupied since 1814 by a community of monks founded in 1606. For many years, the abbey’s library was accessible only to the monks who lived there, but recently the abbey has been working with volunteers to create public access to the collections.
The book includes a series of intriguing recipes from England’s Georgian period. There are recipes for plum pudding and coconut tarts, and for fricassee lobsters and chicken curry. There are also more unusual dishes, though, including, most notably, “Calves Head Turtle Fashion” and “Fricassee of Pigs Feet and Ears.”
Recipe books from this era did not just include recipes for food, but often for medical treatments or other household needs. This one includes a recipe for furniture oil.
If you happen to be in need of such a recipe, or are curious about Calves Head Turtle Fashion, the recipes are being published in a new book, set to be released in April. If you do try out one of the more adventurous recipes, report back, please!
They say the desert attracts dreamers, schemers, and prophets. A mysterious, fanciful structure that tops a knoll in the Airport Gateway District of Phoenix looks like the work of at least two out of three.
Italian immigrant Alessio Carraro dreamed of building a resort hotel as the centerpiece of his high-end subdivision, Carrarro Heights. He and his son constructed the hotel over just fourteen months, between 1928 and 1930. The building was a thing of beauty, based on Italian architecture and tiered like a wedding cake.
However, perhaps because of the stench from the nearby Tovrea meatpacking stockyards, or because of the Great Depression, it never opened. Carraro sold his castle and its 42 acres to Edward Ambrose Tovrea, magnate of the stockyards, who transformed the massive hotel into a private residence. Tovrea died after less than a year living in the castle, and is memorialized by a giant steel pyramid on the property. His widow Della lived there until her death in 1969.
Over the years Tovrea Castle developed an air of mystery. As Phoenix grew outward and the land surrounding the castle developed into a metropolitan area, the isolated mansion and its acres of desert attracted a lot of attention. After Della's death, the land (which had fallen into ruin) was purchased by the City of Phoenix. The structure was restored, its cactus garden replanted, and the grounds were opened for tours.
Visitors on the rare tours (they occur intermittently every couple of months and usually sell out) get to wander across the Tovreas' desert with its 5,000 plants. Then they are led inside, where they get to peek in the basement and the ground floor of this 1930s palace.
In 2008, Jack Norheim's cat, Ernst, left their home in Skellefteå, Sweden, and failed to return. After a while, Norheim, who described Ernst as "practically his best friend," gave him up for gone, The Local reports. Norheim moved across the border to Norway, built a life, found a partner, and had a son. A year ago, he moved back to Skellefteå.
Then, last week, he got a call from the local animal shelter, asking him to come in and pick up his cat.
Ernst wasn't dead—he had just been playing the long game. After he left the Norheim household, the tabby took up with an older couple in a nearby village, who cared for him until they passed away a few weeks ago. He ended up at the shelter, who called the phone number attached to his microchip.
Ernst—who, in photos, looks very pleased with himself—now lives with Norheim and his family once again. "I was a little bit nervous at first," Norheim told local TV broadcaster SVT, but things have been working out great.
Although Ernst is certainly impressive, other recent footloose felines have him beat. This past July, Moon Unit of East London was reunited with his family after eight years of absence, during which he somehow made it to Paris.
In the fall of 2015, Glitter, a stylish cat from Sweden, also turned up in France, about 1000 miles away from home. And way back in 2013, a tortoiseshell named Holly jumped out of her family's RV in Daytona, Florida, and staggered 200 miles back home—apparently on foot—to West Palm Beach.
Imagine you were a rich European in the 16th century, and you wanted to travel. Top on your bucket list might be Venice, a cosmopolitan, free-wheeling city, known for its diversity, romance, and relaxed mores. Venice was a wealthy place, where Titian, Tintoretto, and other famous artists were at the height of their powers. As a republican port city, it was tolerant of all sorts of people and all sorts of behavior in ways that other European cities were not.
While in Venice, you might purchase a flap book to help you remember the good times you had there. Above is one example of an illustration fromLe vere imagini et descritioni delle piv nobilli citta del mondo—"the true images and descriptions of the most noble city in the world."
This image is part of a new exhibition at the New York Public Library, Love in Venice, which includes two flap books from the late 16th century that depict a lascivious kind of love.
The books are attributed to Donato Bertelli, a printmaker and bookseller, although it’s hard to say exactly who wrote the book. What is clear, says Madeleine Viljoen, the curator of the exhibit, is that the book is connected to “a family of very savvy book publishers who understood how to take advantage of people coming to Venice for tourism and people curious about what they might see there and experience there.”
In the 16th century, flap books were a fun innovation in publishing, used for purposes both serious and satirical. One of the most studied types of flap book displayed the anatomy of the human body: you could dissect a person by paging through the flaps. Publishers also would used layers of paper to create volvelles, wheels made of paper that might be used to calculate the movement of the sun or moon.
But there were also some cheekier uses of the flaps. During the Counterreformation, for instance, one flap book let the reader lift up the robes of Martin Luther and peek underneath. “I don’t think it was meant to be playful or titillating,” says Viljoen. “It’s about humiliation.”
Some of the images in the Venetian flap books have an edge to them, too. One shows a woman riding a donkey; flip the image up, and it’s revealed that she’s riding on the back of a man, an image meant, perhaps, to warn of the dangers of female power. There’s also another image of a woman with a flippable dress, but underneath this dress, there are only skeletal legs.
For the most part, though, flap books were supposed to be fun. Another image in the exhibition plays on the famous trope of a woman and her not-very-good chaperone:
“It’s meant to be playful and mischievous and point to why Venice was perceived as playground,” says Viljoen. “What went to Venice was left in Venice.”
From its opening over a century ago, the St. Pauli Elbtunnel grew from a practical mode of transport into a point of national pride.
In the early 20th century the city of Hamburg needed transportation improvement badly. Plans for a suspended railway and a viaduct had fallen through, so the city settled on the revolutionary–and dangerous–plan to dig a tunnel beneath the Elbe River. At a cost of 10.7 million marks, several deaths, and numerous injuries, the construction of the Elbtunnel was no easy task.
Construction began in 1907 with around 4,400 workers toiling beneath the Elbe. Tunneling under the river required that the workspace be pressurized, which resulted in unhealthy conditions for the workers. They suffered from what we now know as "the bends." Three died, 74 were badly wounded, and more than 600 were affected by decompression sickness.
The finished tunnel, measuring just under 2,000 feet long (610 m), opened in 1911. It connected Hamburg's north side (the city center) with the industrial south side (the harbor) which made it significantly easier to travel across the city. Using one of the four car lifts, the pedestrian lift, or the staircase under the magnificent dome of the entrance building, you descend 80 feet before entering the tunnel. Two tubes (one for each flow of traffic) are flanked by pedestrian walkways. The tunnels are lined with white tile and feature artistic plaques of Elbe River life from the early 1900s.
The tunnels provide convenient access to the St. Pauli Piers, a popular tourist destination, and as of 2000 an annual marathon runs through the Elbtunnel. Some of Hamburg's youth even hang out inside it. In 2003 the Elbtunnel was designated a cultural heritage site and in 2011, its 100 year anniversary, it won the award for historic engineering. The Elbtunnel is not just a convenience anymore; it became a landmark.
In 1923, at the age of 65, Henry Stuart from Nampa, Idaho was diagnosed with tuberculosis. They still called it “consumption” in those days, and the typical advice from doctors was to move to a better climate.
Since Alabama was warmer than Idaho, Stuart packed up, bought ten acres of wooded land in Baldwin County, and moved the 2,500 miles.
Once Stuart got to Fairhope, Alabama, he built himself a simple, round home, only 14 feet in diameter, fashioned from bricks and his own hand-made concrete blocks. By 1925 the little hut was just about finished, and Stuart dubbed it “Tolstoy Park.”
Told at the time that he only had a few months left, Stuart wanted a simple life, where he could live on his own terms. His little Alabama home was just that–but for a whole lot longer than a few months. Stuart lived another 22 years, passing away in 1946 at the age of 88.
During the last years of his life, the “Hermit of Montrose” became a fixture in the community, teaching and inspiring many on the Eastern Shore of Mobile Bay.
In 2005 Stuart was once again an inspiration, this time for a novel called "The Poet of Tolstoy Park" by Sonny Brewer (he was also a minor character in Brewer's later novel, "A Sound Like Thunder"). Today, Tolstoy Park is no longer the ten-acre sanctuary it was, surrounded instead by a small cluster of offices and a parking lot. But it is on the National Register of Historic Places, so the little hut is there to stay, where you can visit and imagine the truly simple life.
