"All politics is local" is a political cliché at this point, used by politicians, pundits, and journalists, among other hacks, to mean something like "I don't quite understand what I'm talking about but here's a phrase that can mean pretty much anything and also fills some space."
All of which doesn't mean that some politics aren't local, like, for example, local politics, or, in the case of the Greater Scranton YMCA in eastern Pennsylvania, the tenor of conversations one has at the local gym.
That's because, this week, the gym—after a series of political disputes between members that gym authorities feared might turned violent—blocked 24-hour news channels from its televisions, according to WBRE.
The gym is hoping that might calm the political discourse, or at least move it outside the walls of the YMCA, itself not usually thought of as a home for political argument, though we live in special times.
Even so, members told the station that the hottest political moments at the gym might have already passed.
"I think it is probably an overreaction," YMCA member David Dimmick told WBRE. "There was a lot of arguing going on during the election, protesting, that type of thing. But I think it's all gone now."
You can address a letter to Marley, Illinois. You can check into Marley, Illinois on Facebook. You can say you live in Marley, Illinois and locals will know exactly where you reside. But Marley, Illinois is not an actual town. Well, not anymore.
Marley was once a promising railroad settlement. It was built in 1830 when the Wabash Railroad from Chicago to Joliet cut through the hill on the corner of a farm owned by a man named George Haley, leaving a triangular piece of land that was developed around it. Though incredibly rural, the Marley train stop became an essential milk shipping station into Chicago. Local farmers shipped milk and grains, which caused local businesses to pop up in the area at a rapid rate.
“It was a lively place,” says Julie Cleveland, of Marley in the late 19th and early 20th century. “There used to be Fourth of July parades and everything up and down the streets. I wish I was here back then!”
Cleveland moved to Marley in 1962 when she married her husband, a lifelong resident of the town and member of its founding Marshall family. Originally the secluded, four-street, 111-lot settlement was only inhabited by the Haley family and the Marshall family, with many of the descendants of those families still living in Marley today. The name Marley came about after the post office was built in 1879 and they decided to combine Haley and Marshall into Marley.
In 1932, tragedy struck when a train derailment destroyed the railway station. The station was never rebuilt and Marley was never able to recover from the accident. The tiny town lost so many businesses that now only the school, retirement home, and candle shop, and the white-steepled Marley Church remain. The church has been standing since 1900 with few adjustments, though, according to the late Marley historian Iva Gillet Sproat, “the previous steeple had to be removed in 1924 after being ravaged by woodpeckers."
Today Marley is a short few blocks off of 187th Street that feel like they are stuck back in time, with many of the original farmhouses remaining and former businesses such as the general store having been converted into homes. The last general store closed in 1954, leaving the area mostly residential.
“We don't consider ourselves Mokena or New Lenox,” says Cleveland, referring to the neighboring towns. “We're far enough away to be our own community.”
The community spirit is most evident at Marley Candles, which has been in operation since the ‘60s. Employee Arlene Nelson has created a shrine to the history of Marley and Marley Candles in the back of the store for all curious visitors to peruse. Newspaper clippings, the original candle molds, and documents showing handwritten notes from old Marley residents on their candles are all displayed in glass.
Arlene insists the community is held together by the candle shop and the church, both places that proudly pass on their legacies. Candlemaker Betsy Milligan carries on the tradition of making candles exactly the same way and in the same spot as the original owners did, carefully pouring molds in an almost meditative ritual in the backroom of the shop. Kathy Chapleau and her father John Fixari keep the business going at what is now a staple of the Marley community.
Though Marley residents are proud to say live in Marley, practicality—and the postal service—sometimes require them to assimilate into neighboring communities. Frankfort postal employee Maria Weber recalled seeing “Marley, IL” addressed on mail for years until only a few years ago when the postmaster threatened Marley residents against doing so. “The old postmaster said he would stop delivering their mail if they didn’t start using the correct address,” she says. “Marley doesn’t have its own zipcode.” The postal service has asked Marley inhabitants to use the zipcode of neighboring Mokena.
There is, however, one glimmer of hope for the future. For the first time since the derailment, the railroad tracks are being used again by Metra commuter trains. Who knows? Perhaps Marley can once again grow.
Bir Zekreet (also known as Brouq Peninsula) is a strip of land on the West Coast of Qatar. The peninsula is, by and large, uninhabited, with the exception of a small village, a Coast Guard Post, an ostrich farm, and a fort called “Film City,” purposely built for movie production. Of a more transient nature, camel and goat herders can also be encountered in the area.
The most prominent feature of Bir Zekreet’s landscape is the presence of large escarpments, with pillars and mushroom-like limestone formations. This unusual geology is the result of strong winds blowing away softer sedimentary rock, leaving behind just the harder limestone skeleton exposed.
The region is also a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve, with a special interest in oryx and gazelles. Research in the reserve includes the use of saline water for irrigation, the creation of grazing grounds, camel farming, and low-impact tourism.
North of Film City, and part of the locations created for production, is a particularly photogenic escarpment with a handful of stone huts, one of which is built on top of a stand-alone natural pillar. Although they look like it, none of these little buildings are ancient. But they do make for good, quirky photo opps
In the late 1930s, Michihiko Wada—Mike to his friends and family—graduated from the University of Redlands, in California, and headed east to study engineering. Wada, a slim man with an easy smile, left most of his family—his parents, his sisters—out West. He began building his own life in New York, earning his graduate degree and setting off on what looked to become a promising career.
But then, in February of 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066. One by one, Wada's family members received arrest warrants. His mother, Kuni, who taught at a Japanese language school, was named "a dangerous alien engaging in subversive activities" because she used textbooks approved by the Japanese government in her classroom. His father, the Reverend Masahiko Wada, was accused of "pro-Japanese sympathies and activities." Both were sent to detention facilities in separate states.
Mike left his job in New York and headed back home, where he too was shipped off to an internment camp. After a short stint at a detention center in Wyoming, he ended up at Colorado's Granada Relocation Center, also known as Camp Amache, with his two sisters, his brother-in-law, and his nieces and nephews.
There, he temporarily changed careers. For two years, instead of pursuing his dreams, Wada—along with dozens of Amache detainees—worked as a professional artist at the Amache Silk Screen Shop, printing posters and pamphlets for the U.S. military, the very entity that was imprisoning his entire family.
"He came back from New York knowing full well he would get swept up in the evacuations," says Mitch Homma, Mike's great-nephew. In 2006, Homma found his great-uncle's silk screen work—and many letters, records, and pieces of camp paraphernalia—packed in boxes in his grandmother Kuni's closet. Mike Wada's photos and prints—along with those of the few dozen artists who worked at Amache Silk Screen Shop—make up a bittersweet historical record, shedding color and light on one of America's darkest eras.
As the historian Melvin Yazawa explains in his history of Camp Amache, the Western "relocation centers" that housed 120,000 detainees were constructed hastily. There were a few War Department employees assigned to each camp, in charge of administrative work. But for the most part, it was left to the internees—who generally came to the camps on about a week's notice, with few to no possessions—to piece together various community institutions, based on guidelines set by the War Relocation Authority, or WRA.
When the first prisoners came to Camp Amache, in August of 1942, only a few of the barracks were habitable, and there was no running water. By the time Mike Wada got there about a year later, the camp had a mess hall, a school system, a hospital, a post office, police and firefighting forces, and an elected community council. A look through the Granada Pioneer—Camp Amache's biweekly, bilingual newspaper, itself staffed by internees—details an energetic schedule of camp events, including basketball games, school dances, film screenings, and the occasional carnival.
Amache also had something unique among the camps: a successful silk screen shop. As the war ramped up, the U.S. Navy found themselves with boatloads of new sailors, and—due to the wartime labor shortage—no one to print the posters, charts, and other materials necessary to train them. In the spring of 1943, Maida Campbell, a Red Cross nurse with an artistic background, was sent to Camp Amache to see whether it would be feasible to open a printing operation there.
Campbell set up the shop in a recreation hall, and began advertising in the Pioneer for employees. A month into their work, the Pioneer reported that the shop's 25 artists had printed "some 185 large posters, 250 stickers, and 100 cards," for practice. By August, they had their first order from the Navy, for four posters that depicted "motives for enlistment." Over the course of 1943, the shop printed at least 120,000 posters in dozens of designs, depicting everything from signal flags to principles of seamanship. Employees took on the entire process, from design and stenciling through color selection and printing.
"Because the shop is in a War Relocation Authority center, we have more problems than the average shop," wrote Campbell in an introductory booklet. As she explains, printing was often interrupted by everyday tasks, such as haircuts and doctor's appointments, which could only happen during working hours, when the camp's other amenities were available.
But for the workers—and the internees in general—the main problem was the Colorado dust. "The walls would seep sand and dust, it would come up through the floor," says Homma, whose father—Mike Wada's nephew, Hisao Homma—spent three years of his childhood in the camp. The 1943 April Fool's issue of the Pioneer jokingly reported a monthly dust forecast of "about 750 feet." If a windstorm kicked up, the shop had to be abandoned, lest the wet posters get coated in it.
The dust was but one unsettling aspect of a place that was, essentially, a massive interruption. As Yazawa writes, most internees had been forced to evacuate their homes extremely quickly. Many lost their jobs, possessions, and homes while they were gone. "It changed our family forever," says Homma, whose relatives started anew in Seattle after they were released.
Although silk screening jobs were in demand, the shop wasn't immune to further injustices. The pay topped out at $19 per month, about half of what one could expect to receive for similar work outside. Despite Campbell's evident respect for her employees, she, like other administrators, wrote frequently about how the shop provided "vocational training" for them—never mind the fact that their detainment at the camp was preventing them from pursuing their actual vocations, hobbies, and lives.
Still, the workers made the most of it. When there were no Navy orders to fill, the artists turned their skills toward helping the community. The silk screen shop took every opportunity to brighten up ordinary camp materials, printing brochure covers, Thanksgiving menus, food production guideline posters, concert programs, and the annual high school yearbook, among many other items.
On Christmas Eve, 1943, the artists trekked around camp, hand-delivering a special calendar they had designed and pressed in 20 colors. The shop also offered to print diplomas for graduates of every camp school in the country—although it's unclear whether the plan ever went through—and fielded a basketball team (which, according to the camp's sports pages, tended to trounce the Pioneer's team). "That's very Japanese," says Homma. "You work for the good of the community, and you give back to the community."
Artists also pursued their own projects. In their first days, to learn the silk screening process, each new employee drew a bookplate, Christmas card, or letterhead, and took it through the whole workflow. Some artists exhibited their work in camp shows, while others drew comics for the Pioneer.
Mike Wada, who worked in the shop darkroom, immediately took to photography. Although internees technically weren't allowed their own cameras, he was able to practice in his off-hours thanks to his brother-in-law, Dr. Kyushiro Homma, an avid photographer who had brought some along in his capacity as camp dentist. Wada's photograph above, of the camp's imposing water tower, was reimagined in the silk screen shop as the frontispiece of the camp Christmas calendar, and is probably the best-known print to come out of the shop.
Over its two-year tenure, the Amache Silk Screen Shop doubled in size, eventually employing 50 people. (The employees at one point had to renovate a second recreation hall to fit everyone.) And after a second shop, at Wyoming's Heart Mountain Camp, failed to get off the ground, the Amache crew inherited all of its equipment. By the time the shop shuttered, in May of 1945, its artists had printed over 250,000 posters.
In the meantime, Wada, like the rest of the country's detainees, had lost years of his life. He'd also lost his brother-in-law and mentor, Dr. Homma—Mitch's grandfather—who shed 50 pounds over the course of his incarceration, and died of a heart attack and stroke in August of 1944. For decades, Wada and his family also lost the will to talk much about their experience. "When I was growing up, and I heard people talking about camp, I thought they meant church camp," says Homma. It took until the aftermath of the September 11, 2001, attacks, when the U.S. government began detaining some Muslim people, before most survivors Homma knows began speaking up about their experiences, he says: "They were always told it wouldn't happen again."
Mike Wada went back to New York and became an engineer; by the time he died, in the late 1980s, he was the Vice President of Mitsubishi North America. Like many people who took up creative work in the internment camps, he never silkscreened anything again. He did bring one thing with him, though: "All his life he was an avid photographer," says Mitch.
Border agents at London’s Heathrow Airport recently arrested a slick customer in a major smuggling bust. The items he is accused of trying to sneak through customs? Some 600,000 eels.
According to the Evening Standard, agents at the airport caught a 64-year-old man from the Chessington area of London attempting to smuggle the eels into Hong Kong. Glass eels are considered a delicacy in many East Asian countries, but the European Union has enforced a total ban on their export since their numbers went into sharp decline.
The man had hidden the trays of eels beneath shipments of other, totally legal fish, but his simple scheme didn’t pass inspection. Officials with Britain's Border Force consider the seizure to be a major bust, estimating that, on the eel black market, the seafood would have been worth nearly $1.5 million.
Having originated in Spain, the eels were returned to their home country. It is unclear if they would be eaten.
In ancient Greece, guys with STDs didn’t have a ton of options when it came to medical treatments. Sick people often had no recourse other than to appeal to Asclepius, god of health and medicine. They’d go to his temples, and after Asclepius “cured” them in exchange for an offering or a fee, grateful supplicants dedicated votive reliefs in the shape of the body part he healed. As a result, archaeologists have found many terracotta carvings over the years of Ancient Greek legs, arms, ears, or, yes, even penises.
It’s believed such carvings either commemorated successful healings or were requests to get Asclepius to pay attention to ailing limbs. They would have been hung in the sanctuary—called an Asclepeion—in a public area, so visitors could see just how good at his job Asclepius was. Models of genitals, breasts, eyes, ears, and limbs were pierced and hung from the ceiling; reproductions of larger portions of the body, such as torsos or entire heads, were put on shelves.
In a process called incubation, patients would sleep overnight in a room dedicated to healing, known as anabaton; Asclepius, they believed, would then help either “by direct intervention (laying on of hands, applying medicines, even performing surgery) or indirectly by sending a dream in which he recommended a treatment,” as the classicist Steven M. Oberhelman writes in the Athens Journal of Health. In the ancient world, there wasn’t the same division between what modern scholars define as professional medicine (i.e., a practicing doctor) and “popular medicine” (think homeopathic healers and herbalists, charm-sellers and magicians). And it’s worth noting that Asclepius wasn’t the only deity believed to have magical healing powers.
Some sanctuaries may have specialized in healing certain diseases. According to Oberhelman, 40 percent of the votives found at the Athenian Asclepeion depicted eyes, indicating visitors often asked for help with ophthalmic issues. At Corinth, most of the models were of hands and feet, perhaps reflecting agricultural injuries to local farmers, and genitals, suggesting that Corinthians may have suffered in particular from sexually transmitted diseases.
At the Asclepeion in Epidaurus, the iamata, or patients’ chronicles of how Asclepius cured them, were inscribed on stelae, probably by priests; although some scholars debate these stories’ factual reliability, they remain fascinating chronicles of the belief in dream healing in Ancient Greece. One iamaton reads: “Hermon from Thasos. This man, who was blind, he healed. When he did not subsequently bring the healing fee, the god again made him blind. When he came back and slept in the sanctuary again, he healed him.” One woman named Nikasibula was “sleeping for children,” meaning she was asking the god to heal her infertility. Her night in the abaton found her dreaming of Asclepius coming to her, “bringing a snake slithering with him. She had sex with it.” As a result of this dream, Nikasibula reportedly gave birth to two boys within the year.
A historic site that contains a few genuine artifacts is an achievement, but for the hardcore history buff, the Warren G. Harding Home in Marion, Ohio is the ultimate jackpot: a home with 98% original artifacts.
Warren G. Harding became the 29th president of the United States after running a campaign hinged on "a return to normalcy." Much of that campaign was conducted from Harding's own front porch, where crowds, eventually numbering in the hundreds of thousands, would flock to hear him speak.
When the Hardings moved to Washington in 1920, they stored all their belongings in a friend’s barn. After the President died of a heart attack two years into his term (not surprising since he reportedly ate over 20 waffles a day), his belongings remained in that barn until the Home Museum acquired the entire collection in 1926.
Even though Harding would be remembered as one of the least favorable presidents after news of corruption leaked following his death, the sheer volume of Harding artifacts in the house makes it worth a visit. Most museums are lucky if they can display a presidential suit, but the Warren G. Harding Home has his entire wardrobe, including his undergarments neatly folded in the top drawer of the president’s bureau. The house contains not only Harding’s enormous cigar humidor, but also his personal tobacco stash, still pleasantly musky almost 100 years later. Perhaps the most bizarre item in the collection was the handheld urinal Harding used on his sickbed, which still contained trace amounts of presidential urine.
The house is so authentically preserved new artifacts are still being discovered. One of the museum employees was cataloging items in the attic when he came across a note with a small vial attached. When he noticed the note was signed by Marie Curie, he called in some scientists from a local university. The vial contained a sample of radium that is now housed in a special facility with other radioactive materials. Harding apparently couldn’t resist acting irresponsibly, even from the grave.
Over 7.6 million people have "liked" The Weather Channel's Facebook page, which, as far as brand accomplishments go, isn't bad. But all those millions aren't coming for a daily forecast, they're coming for hot viral content, which The Weather Channel serves up a few times an hour, frequently in the form of short videos, some of which are dubbed "Viral Weather."
Nature, you see, is the original viral hit maker.
Earlier today they posted the video you see above, featuring a tree that began burning from the inside after being struck by lightning in St. Louis. The video was shot on Wednesday, according to the station.
The Weather Channel also calls the tree "totally eerie," a fair description given that the tree was located in a cemetery, in addition to, on the video, the audible, reasonably heavy wheezing of the videographer.
Perhaps, though, whoever was taking the video simply knew then what The Weather Channel picked up on later: they just might have a viral hit on their hands.
If anyone is responsible for the extravagant, envelope-pushing style of Tokyo's Harajuku neighborhood it's designer Sebastian Masuda. After the success of his boutique 6%DOKIDOKI, Masuda went on to work with the pop star Kyary Pamyu Pamyu. His latest venture is Shibuya's Kawaii Monster Cafe, which encapsulates the hyper-cute aesthetic of a children's television program with a twist of dark creepiness.
The restaurant is supposed to evoke the spirit of Harajuku itself—colorful, loud, flashy, and growing outward, consuming everything in its path.
Visitors enter the cafe through the mouth of a goggle-eyed monster and are immediately greeted by a merry-go-round of life-sized gummy bears, peppermints, cupcakes, and other sweets. From here, they have the choice of four different dining sections. The Mushroom Disco has psychedelic booth seating beneath the cover of gigantic, multicolored fungi. The Milk Stand is decidedly adorable, with bunny and unicorn heads drinking from baby bottle chandeliers. In the Bar Experiment guests can sip cocktails inside the subterranean glow of an indigo jellyfish. Finally, the Mel-Tea Room surrounds its guests with pillars of pastel macarons and frosted wainscoting.
The waitstaff fit the theme too. Each fits into one of five Monster Girl archetypes: "Baby" is sweet and kitten-like, "Candy" is excitable and neon, "Dolly" is prissy in red bows and frills, "Crazy" is a moody, gender-bending alien, and "Nasty" is a sexy cyber-goth.
Even the food is like something out of a rainbow-tinted nightmare. You can follow the candy salad and "Painter's Pasta," a heap of multicolored noodles on an artist's palette with the decadent "Colorful Poison Parfait Extreme," an explosion of ice cream, cookies, frosting, and fruit.
Then-Vice President Richard Nixon stopped by the National Archives building on June 29, 1954, to pay his respects at the unveiling of the shrine to the U.S. Constitution, Bill of Rights, and Declaration of Independence. Joining him was the president of the Mosler Safe Company, the storied metalworks that built the gold vaults at Fort Knox, the blast doors for the Manhattan Project, and the Navy’s first ironclad warship.
To help illustrate the inner workings of his latest creation for the Archives, Ed Mosler Jr. pointed Nixon to a refrigerator-sized electric model. With the flick of a switch, they watched in dollhouse-scale as a tiny Constitution lowered from its display case and tucked into a subterranean armored strongbox. Lest anyone forget the master safe builder behind this unique device, the model helpfully bore the name “MOSLER,” in 72-point bold font.
Until around the year 2000, this model vault stood guard in the Archives vestibule and delighted onlookers with its twice an hour, on the half hour performance. Mosler originally built it not as an educational device, but as a means of winning the government contract to build a full-scale vault to protect the nation's founding texts from atomic bombs. “It was a sales tactic,” says Richard O Jones of the Butler County Historical Society in Hamilton, Ohio. "They built this model as a concept and they took it to the National Archives to show them how it would work.”
The model impressed the archivists and Mosler got the contract. Later, Mosler donated the model to the government and arranged for its prominent display near the full-sized Constitution.
In the early 2000s, the Archives underwent major renovations and got a new state-of-the-art vault designed by Diebold. During construction, the model made its way downstairs and was promptly forgotten about. It wasn't until Atlas Obscura made inquiries last month that staffers at the Archives rediscovered the model in an unceremonious nook, where it had been gathering dust and leaking oil on the carpet.
According to Archives Director of Public Affairs Miriam Kleiman, the rediscovery has “created a whole resurgence of interest within the building … The thought that this 1954 thing no longer existed.”
Kleiman says the model has now been relocated to a more prominent spot within the Archives offices, and a historical plaque has been mounted on the wall for the first time. Archives staff also couldn’t resist testing to see if the button still worked after almost two decades in storage.
"No one knew if this would work," says Kleiman. "Because of security concerns, this decision had to go up to the Archivist of the United States, and he came down immediately, he thought it was so cool."
Kleiman confirms that the model still works beautifully, looking none the older for its 63 years of age. They also gave the device a thorough dusting and took a series of photos for the historical record.
It turns out there's actually another model out there, too. Mosler built an identical sister model for its headquarters in Hamilton, Ohio. When they went out of business decades later, the model made its way to the Butler County Historical Society. "It’s out on display in a room called the Ritchie Auditorium, and anybody can go in and look at it," says Jones.
Underneath the bustling streets of Dupont Circle in Washington, D.C. there's a long-abandoned trolley station and tunnels that have found fresh use as an art space.
For nearly 100 years, a network of streetcars ferried Washingtonians around the city, originally drawn by horses and later powered by elevated electric cables. The Dupont Circle station was constructed in 1949 and was unique in the streetcar system for being the only station that was built underground. It was in operation until the system was shut down and replaced by bus lines in 1962 and with plans for the Metro train system on the horizon.
The discontinued streetcar station was briefly set up to be a fallout shelter in the case of nuclear war with the Soviet Union, but even that function was ended in 1975 and the tunnels were sealed off and abandoned.
In 1995, a developer bought the abandoned tunnels from the city and built an ill-fated food court, called Dupont Down Under, on the abandoned tracks, with a dozen fast food vendors all operating out of spaces designed to look like the old streetcars. The project was short-lived, however. Ventilation and lighting were poor, employees were miserable from working in the dank and windowless area all day, and customers were hesitant to go underground into abandoned tunnels for a bite to eat. Dupont Down Under was shut down in only a few months and the tunnels were abandoned once again.
The tunnels were reopened to the public in late 2016, however, and the 75,000-square-foot former streetcar station is in the process of being converted into an artistic space. Local artists have begun transforming the tunnels into installations, including pieces that incorporate light and sound with the acoustics of the tunnels. Graffiti adorns the concrete walls and artistic pieces are tucked away in corners among the rubble of the abandoned food court.
In Thailand, some people believe that it’s good luck to throw a coin into a turtle pond. One unfortunate casualty of this belief is a turtle who’s been named Om Sin—“piggy bank”—after hundreds of coins were found in his stomach, the Bangkok Post reports.
The turtle was living in a pond in Sri Racha (yes, that’s where the spicy sauce’s name comes from), which was being shut down. The pond’s turtles were transferred to Sea Turtle Conservation Centre; this one could barely swim.
Veterinarians gave the turtle a CT scan and were “shocked” to see the coins inside, the Post writes.
The coins weighed, in total, more than 11 pounds. Veterinarians spent seven hours removing 915 coins from inside the turtle, which is expected to recover.
Are you someone with a lot of ideas? Do people tend to call them "kind of fishy"? This could be your lucky day! As the Detroit News reports, the Michigan Legislature recently earmarked a cool $1 million for anyone in the world who can help them fin-ish off their Asian carp problem.
Puns aside, Asian carp in Michigan are no laughing matter. Since their introduction to Southern fish farm ponds in the 1970s, the non-native fish has munched its way northward, out-eating and out-laying indigenous species and essentially taking over ecosystems. If they are able to establish themselves in the Great Lakes, it will be almost impossible to undo the damage—both to native wildlife and to tourist activities like fishing and boating.
Over the past six years, the federal government has spent hundreds of millions of dollars battling Asian carp. Although this contest was floated before the new administration took office, changes in Washington may make outside help even more crucial. President Trump has already halted at least one carp defense attempt, and early plans for the EPA budget show federal funding for Great Lakes initiatives being slashed by about 97%.
"I think in the fight against Asian carp, there aren't really any bad ideas," Molly Flanagan, of the Alliance for the Great Lakes, told the News. "We have to try a bunch of different things." So if you find yourself carping on a particular plan, consider putting it forward—it might just save the greatest lakes we've got.
Every day, we track down a fleeting wonder—something amazing that’s only happening right now. Have a tip for us? Tell us about it! Send your temporary miracles to cara@atlasobscura.com.
The adult coloring book fad may be losing popularity, but another genre of play once reserved for children is gaining ground in the adult world: the hidden picture book. Where children have long been tasked with trying to find Waldo, grown-ups can now find Beyoncé or Andy Warhol. One new game called Hidden Folkstakes the concept a step further: to find the targets of your search, you might need to pick bananas, dig a hole, or peek behind, under, or inside one of many spots in a teeming panorama.
In German, there’s a special word for these type of picture books: wimmelbilderbuch.Wimmel comes from wimmeln, which means “to teem” and bilderbuch means picture book. Wimmelbilderbuch: a picture book teeming with images and life.
These books have been popular in Germany since the mid-20th century, when they were popularized by the artist Hans Jürgen Press. Wimmelbilderbuch are not necessarily framed around the search for a particular character in each image; many have a looser framework of “disordered complexity,” which gives readers a chance to make up their own stories, writes Cornelia Rémi, a German scholar of literature. Rémi calls these books “a narrative threshold genre” for children, who can learn “different strategies of coping with the world and telling stories.”
Part of the wonder and pleasure of these games are the detailed worlds portrayed in each scene. In every spot, a tiny story is playing out, and even without finding the designated person, it can be delightful to explore such pages. Master painters from the Netherlands—Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Bruegel the Elder, most famously—knew this better than anyone. Back in the 15th and 16th centuries, long before German illustrators marshaled this type of imagery to engage children, these painters were using the same techniques. Consider, for instance, Breugel’s Children’s Games:
If you look at the details, you can find all forms of child’s play:
But also some more adult details:
And here’s his painting portraying Dutch proverbs:
Which has its own evocative details:
Bosch, who inspired Bruegel, had a much more disturbing world to portray. Here is his Garden of Earthly Delights:
Where you can find limbs aplenty:
But also dangerous spaces:
And disembodied ears:
It’s nearly impossible to describe one of these paintings. As Rémi puts it, “Any attempt at grasping a wimmelpicture exhaustively is doomed to fail.” Her interest is in the role such books can play in children’s cognitive development, but her assessment is also helpful to understanding why they might appeal to adults just as well. “Learning how to handle the demanding abundance of a wimmelpicture therefore implies learning how to cope with a complex world,” she writes.
We all need help coping with the overwhelming complexity of the world sometimes: even—maybe even especially—as adults. In a wimmelpicture, whether it features Beyoncé or Adam and Eve, it can feel like that might actually be an achievable goal.
At first glance, a couple shaded in black and white look like graffiti art you'd typically find painted on the buildings of San Francisco. But upon closer inspection, you'll see the woman's hair blowing in the breeze just as the man turns his head. This street art is alive.
Artist Alexa Meade transforms three-dimensional objects into what has been described as "living art." While many artists aim to make their paintings more realistic, Meade has become known for turning real physical spaces, people, and objects into flat paintings. The video above reveals how Meade applies paint onto two models' faces, hair, arms, legs, and clothes—shading in light and shadow to make the couple look like they walked off of a canvas.
"I don't paint on canvas. I paint directly in three-dimensional space," Meade explains in a video by Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, where she was an artist-in-residence. "In my work I'm able to transform almost any three-dimensional space into something that appears 2-D."
In other installations of her living art, Meade has painted entire rooms, vehicles, and sets to look like chalkboard, gallery paintings, and pop art. To create this illusion, Meade doesn't use Photoshop or post-processing. She simply plays with "the light and shadow within a space."
See more of her living artwork in the reel below.
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.
Between gates A10 and A12 in the Pittsburgh International Airport, one shop stands out from the rest. Fraley's Robot Repair appears to be straight out of the 1950s with its streamlined electric blue interior, but its goods are straight out of the future: dozens of disassembled robots dangle throughout the space, their wires exposed.
The shop has all the trimmings of a midcentury electronics repair shop whose owners have just stepped out. It's the attention to detail that sets the scene, with vintage artifacts and futuristic inventions paired together. Typewriters and chunky red telephones sit next to shelves of paint and tools, while broken robots slump in corners. An x-ray displays a broken robo-arm, while a Robot Repair Manual lays next to an emergency R.A.N. kit ("Robot Apprehension Net").
Nothing is for sale here, and unfortunately, if you do have a robot, you can't bring it in for fixing. This is the work of installation artist Toby Fraley, who rearranges the charming scene inside his storefront on a regular basis.
As a child, Fraley was inspired by his father's Popular Mechanics and Popular Science magazines, both of which predicted a future laden with jet packs and hovercars. When he was invited to create an art installation as part of Downtown Pittsburgh's "Project Pop Up," he wanted to create an alternate historical reality in which we not only have humanoid robots, but we take them in for repairs rather than casting them off when they malfunction.
The shop was disassembled after the project ended, but after a successful Kickstarter campaign the artist was able to reopen his faux shop in the Pittsburgh International Airport. The shop draws stares from puzzled travelers who aren't sure what to make of Fraley's Robot Repair. When they pull themselves away though, they are generally amused, which is exactly what Fraley intends.
While there are endless different kinds of dioramas, there is something that most all of them have in common: the strange beauty that comes from capturing our world in miniature, in exacting detail. Some of the most impressive examples of this craft are on display in museums around the globe, while others a bit more off the beaten path. From bizarre to beautiful, here are nine places to see these intricate three-dimensional snapshots of the world.
Since 1907, Harvard University has managed 3,000 acres of woodlands in western Massachusetts that serve as the field lab and research center for the university’s graduate forestry program. And in the midst of this forest is the Fisher Museum, home to a series of beautifully realistic dioramas that tell the history of the forestry itself.
This workshop and small museum is dedicated to santons, the tiny, delicately built figurines that originated as a subversive craft after the French Revolution.
In an attempt to cling on to their Catholicism under an anti-clerical leadership, many French people began to construct makeshift Nativity scenes out of papier-mâché and anything they could get their hands on. This figurine-making tradition turned into an enterprise, and the figurines became named “santons.” This form of craftsmanship has lived on in Aubagne, France.
Circus magnate John Ringling and his wife Mabel used their fortune to build a beautiful Venetian mansion and art collection in Sarasota, Florida. Today on the lavish estate stands a museum all about the circus, which features the largest circus miniature in the world. The expansive yet detailed 3,800-square-foot Howard Bros. Circus diorama shows each and every part of the early 20th-century circus experience.
At the Jaca Citadel Military Miniatures Museum, 32,000 tiny soldiers are posed in 23 historical settings.
In just under an hour, a walking tour through the museum can take you from ancient chariot warfare in Egypt to the massive rolling tanks of World War II. Created with thousands of lead pieces each less than an inch high, the museum chronologically documents the most important battles from vastly different parts of world history.
The delightful Froggyland museum in Croatia is wonderfully strange collection of 500 stuffed frogs doing human activities like going to school or playing tennis.
The collection of anthropomorphic amphibians is arranged in 21 cases and shows a variety of scenes. These dioramas were the life’s work of 20th century Hungarian taxidermist Ferenc Mere, who devoted 10 years to stuffing and meticulously arranging the frogs. Mere’s project may sound eccentric, but his work is truly remarkable.
In a small room in the recently restored Old Exhibit building at the Hoover Dam is a huge topographical map model of a number of southwestern states, showing all of the places that the Hoover Dam has benefited.
Major cities, geological spots, and various dams and reservoirs along the Colorado River are meticulously labeled, and places like the Grand Canyon and the Valley of Fire are lovingly depicted in the diorama.
A series of dioramas and animatronics at this museum leads you through the story of Bhagavad-gita, the Indian literary classic that remains sacred to over six million people.
The Bhagavad-gita Museum, working as part of the larger Hare Krishna community facility in Culver City, California, is meant to educate, inspire, and give visitors a better understanding of the 700-verse spiritual text.
In the main room of the small North End branch of the Boston Public Library, you’ll find an exact replica of the Venetian Doge’s Palace
This unexpected treasure was the life’s work of Miss Henrietta Macy, a Boston school teacher who later moved to Venice and fell in love with the architecture of the palace. This lovely oddity tucked away in the library is the result of her obsession.
The Empress is the most famous hotel in Victoria, maybe in all of British Columbia. It has a long and storied history, full of everything a grand hotel needs—elegance, high tea, a touch of royalty, and a healthy dose of scandal. But there are other reasons to come to the Empress, ones that no other hotel has, such as Miniature World, its collection of more than 85 exquisitely detailed miniature dioramas.
In northern Sweden, about 75 miles above the Arctic Circle, the tiny village of Lovikka is famous for some mittens. They have helped keep Swedes from frostbite ever since they were first created by a young villager named Erika Aittamaa in 1892.
The village of Lovikka, with a population of only 61, looks much like it did in 1892, with one exception: the World’s largest knitted mitten, sitting inside a protective wood and glass display case, pops out of the scrappy pine trees along northern route 395.
The mitten is nearly 12 feet (3.5 m) tall, and is the work of 14 local knitters from the Lovikka Housewives Association. It took a little over month and 50 pounds of wool to finish the job, and in the year 2000 it earned a citation from the Guinness folks that it was, indeed, the largest knitted mitten in the world.
After Erika Aittamaa made that first pair, word of the warmth and simple beauty of the Lovikka mitten spread, and she taught other women in the village to make them exactly the same way. A classic “cottage industry” grew, and the mittens went on to be manufactured in larger quantities throughout the 20th century. More recently the local craft has taken a hit from cheaper versions made in large factories overseas, but the little northern village keeps alive the legacy of their special contribution, right there on display.
The image above depicts a clever trick played on battlefields during World War II: Bobbing next to a sturdy metal tank is a rubber inflatable copy meant to fool enemies. An army could look twice as large as it was thanks to elite divisions of the military that specialized in the art of decoys and deception.
Military units within both the Allied and Axis forces practiced and deployed an assortment of peculiar, yet effective tactics, from building inflated dummy tanks to constructing wooden artillery and straw airplanes. A fleet of dummy tanks could lead an enemy to overestimate a force’s actual strength or draw an attack away from a vulnerable area, explained Gordon Rottman in World War II Tactical Camouflage Techniques.
“Decoys are extremely important in deception planning,” stated an U.S. army field manual published in 1978. Something as simple as “a log sticking out of a pile of brush can draw a lot of attention and artillery fire.”
New photos uncovered by the National Archives reveal the elaborate artistry behind building a “fake army.” The featured photos taken between 1942 and 1945 depict the variety of creative deception tactics developed by the Japanese, German, and British military.
During both World Wars, artists, filmmakers, scientists, and sculptors were handpicked by the military and called upon to use their visual and creative skills to design camouflage and decoys. Beginning in World War I, artists used “dazzle camouflage” and painted battleships with odd, multicolored patterns to distract far-off enemies, while female art students designed camouflage “rock” suits that they tested in Van Cortlandt Park in New York.
The United States recruited over a thousand men from art schools and ad agencies for the 23rd Headquarters Special Troops, or “Ghost Army,” which staged more than 20 battlefield deceptions between 1944 and 1945. In England, a group of surrealist artists started the Industrial Camouflage Research Unit just after the war began in September 1939, wrote Peter Forbes in Dazzled and Deceived: Mimicry and Camouflage.
The dummies took on many forms, including stationary structures that supplied the outline of machinery and a simulation that was mounted on a truck. Inventions could be simple and crude, such as stacking up old tires and propping up a log to simulate an artillery piece, explained Kenneth Blanks in his thesis on tactical decoys.
On the other hand, some deceptions were large-scale, such as fake roads and bridges made out of canvas and burlap. At a distance, the elaborate dummy tanks could easily be confused for the real thing. They were made of an assortment of canvas and plywood, inflated rubber, and drain pipes to form the gun. A Japanese fake tank constructed out of rubble and volcanic ash was commended for its attention to detail and artistry. Inflated tanks were not only used to trick the enemy, but also served to practice formations.
Many of the dummies were also easy to transport and assemble. An inflatable tank could be unfurled from a duffle bag, pumped with air from a generator, and completed in just 20 minutes.
Watch soldiers set up inflatable decoys in the video below:
Entire decoy airfields were made by Britain’s Royal Air Ministry. Instead of hiding the easily spotted structures, they designed dummy airfields filled with dummy planes that were imitations of satellite stations. The unit also lit oil fires, called “starfishes,” in harmless locations after the first wave of a bombing raid, making subsequent waves believe those areas were targets, explained Forbes. While preserving the real fleet, the tactic wasted the enemy’s bombs and ammunition.
And these efforts proved to be extremely effective. For example, in the summer of 1940, Colonel J.F. Turner of the Royal Air Ministry organized 100 dummy airfields and built about 400 dummy aircrafts to confuse German aerial bombers. In one raid on August 4, 1940, three waves of bombs struck the decoy structures, leaving the real factory almost unscathed. Turner’s sophisticated dummy aircrafts “saved hundreds of lives and vital war production facilities,” wrote Blanks. Similarly, the U.S. military’s Ghost Army saved tens of thousands of soldiers’ lives, estimatedThe Atlantic.
This ingenious craft has since faded with time. Sophisticated surveillance technologies, such as satellites and drones, have since made ballooned tanks, straw airplanes, and other visual ruses less effective. But the decoy armies of World War II remain a captivating example of the intricate art of military deception and trickery in action.
Explore more dummy installations from World War II below.
*Correction: An earlier version of this story misspelled a location in Italy. It is Forte dei Marmi, not Forte dei Maimi.
In one of the sweeter family gestures ever devised, for the past 33 years, a father and daughter—who live about 65 miles apart outside of London—have been mailing the same birthday card back and forth for 33 years, adding something new before each post. But now it’s been lost in the mail.
According to the BBC, the card was first sent by Claire Fuller to her father Stephen in 1984. The card features an image of a sad duckling in a yellow rain jacket and red wellingtons, looking forlornly into a puddle, with a simple “Happy Birthday” printed on the inside.
My Dad & I have been exchanging this birthday card since 1984. This February it got lost in the post :-( If you find it send it home to me. pic.twitter.com/YxTOAksET4
The next year, on her 18th birthday, her father added a new message and gave the card back, and they’ve been going back and forth between each other in that way every year since. Each time they send it, they add another message, in smaller and smaller type, as room on the card continues to dwindle, and the cardstock gets more frail.
But this year, Stephen sent it off on February 10th, and it has yet to materialize at Claire’s place. After thousands on social media called for the Royal Mail to look into the card’s whereabouts, they said that they are trying to track it. Hopefully, that little duck won’t be lost for long.
