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The Diva Who Grew Her Own Exotic Kingdom

Hanna Puacz was a Polish teenager when Russia's tsar made her into a star. With her new name Madame Ganna Walska, she became a celebrity in Europe known for her marriages, her love of plants, and her Sisyphean pursuit of a career in opera.

Madame accepted numerous marriage proposals and in total had six husbands, including a Russian count, a yogi, a playboy conman and the inventor of an electromagnetic “death ray”.

When she wasn’t playing ‘femme fatale’ and enjoying the high life that her first marriage had introduced her to, a good chunk of her time was spent in pursuit of a career as an opera singer.

The only problem was– Madame Walska couldn’t sing– or at least, if she could, no one was aware of her talent due to a crippling case of stage fright.

Madame Walska moved to the United States to avoid World War I, and in 1941 started building her legacy in the form of a garden in California known as Lotusland. Home to 3,000 plant species, Lotusland features Walska's extravagant sense of design, combining French statuary, Buddhist temples, discarded glass, giant clams, and topiary. She dedicated her life to the garden until her death at age 96. Read about Madame Ganna Walska and Lotusland at Messy Nessy Chic.


The North-Going Goat and the South-Going Goat

Last weekend, two goats were discovered to be in a predicament after they had walked out on a beam beneath the Mahoning River Bridge in Pennsylvania. They ran into an obstacle at about 200 feet into their adventure, so the brown goat turned around to go back.

The brown goat managed the trick. "He walked out to a concrete pier and somehow got himself turned around," says Todd Tilson, operations manager in the maintenance department of the Pennsylvania Turnpike.

The white goat did not manage to turn around.

That's why, in the photo, you'll see the two goats facing each other.

Tilson reports that the brown goat "kept hitting the white one with its head" to make it walk backward. "It would take one step, two steps back, then stop," he says.

And really, can you blame it? Would you want to walk backward on a beam that is about 8 inches wide and 100 feet above the ground?

Yeah, me neither.

The owner of the goats said they were there 18 hours, resembling the Dr. Seuss tale of the North-Going Zax and the South-Going Zax. The Pennsylvania Turnpike staff borrowed a crane from the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation. But could they gets the goats down without spooking them into falling? Read about the dramatic goat rescue at NPR. -via reddit

(Image credit: Pennsylvania Turnpike)


The Africans Who Called Tudor England Home

The Tudor dynasty that ruled England from 1485 to 1603 had plenty of drama, but the peculiar institution of slavery was not one of them. And neither was the population totally white, as depicted in historical dramas. People from Africa and their descendants were a small minority, but during that period, they lived among various social classes in England: servant, tradesman, craftsman, farmer, and even part of the royal staff.

At the College of Arms in London on a 60-foot-long vellum manuscript sits an image of a man atop a horse, with a trumpet in hand and a turban around his head. This is John Blanke, a black African trumpeter who lived under the Tudors. The manuscript was originally used to announce the Westminster Tournament in celebration of the 1511 birth of Henry, Duke of Cornwall, Henry VIII’s son. Blanke was hired for the court by Henry VII. The job came with high wages, room and board, clothing, and was considered the highest possible position a musician could obtain in Tudor England.

Blanke was no anomaly, but was one of hundreds of West and Northern Africans living freely and working in England during the Tudor dynasty. Many came via Portuguese trading vessels that had enslaved Africans onboard, others came with merchants or from captured Spanish vessels. However once in England, Africans worked and lived like other English citizens, were able to testify in court, and climbed the social hierarchy of their time. A few of their stories are now captured in the book, Black Tudors by author and historian Miranda Kaufmann.

So what changed? The age of exploration and the lucrative new colonies that relied on slave labor to enrich those who claimed them. Read about the changing status of black people in England at Atlas Obscura.


Guy Discovers What IKEA Furniture Is Really Made Of While Working On Design Hack

Most of us are fine with the fact that IKEA furniture is made of pine or particle board, especially because you can hack their stuff together in lots of cool new ways and the price is unbeatable.

But writer James L. Sutter made a disillusioning discovery while doing some design hacking on a desk that might put some people off- IKEA's "particle board" furniture is made with cardboard.

James made it clear he didn't really have a problem with the cardboard content in IKEA furniture, he was just surprised to find it in there, and one Twitter user explained why using cardboard in particle board is actually a good thing:

-Via DesignTAXI


This Incredible CGI Timelapse Shows How The Death Star Would Have Been Built

The Death Star is the most iconic space stations in the history of sci-fi and one of the most recognizable symbols of Star Wars, and yet Luke and the Rebel Alliance figured out how to destroy it with two well-placed proton torpedoes.

They knew about the Death Star's built-in flaw thanks to some stolen plans, but we never got to see how the massive space station was built in the movies.

But now thanks to the hard work of two geeky and talented brothers named Benjamin and Isaac Botkin we can see how hard it would be, and how many pieces it would take, for the Empire to build a Death Star.

And with Benjamin's epic score accompanying the complex timelapse animation it's a mesmerizing look at the making of a legend.

(YouTube Link)

-Via io9


The Lava Lamps That Help Keep The Internet Secure

What in the world do lava lamps have to do with internet security? It about random numbers, because unpredictable sequences of numbers is crucial for proper encrypting. Machines aren't good at generating random numbers, because we design our technology to be as predictable as possible, lest we trigger a robot uprising. However, flowing liquid is about as random as you get. An entire wall of lava lamps moving colored liquid around is is unpredictable enough to generate random numbers.

(YouTube link)

Learn how it's done with Tom Scott, who is still in California finding us interesting things to learn about. This report is from Cloudflare in San Francisco.


Crystal Clear Pumpkin Pie

The experimental kitchen at Chicago restaurant Alinea has produced a transparent pie that tastes just like traditional pumpkin pie. Created by executive chef Mike Bagale and chef de cuisine Simon Davies, it's not the kind of thing you can just whip up at home, unless you have a rotary evaporator, or a moonshine still that's not being used.  

To make their translucent pumpkin pie, Bagale creates a heavily spiced traditional pumpkin pie filling, blends it with water, and then pours that liquid into a rotary evaporator, a device that distills liquids. He explains his process:

"We put the pumpkin pie stock under a vacuum, and that stock boils at room temperature. Because it’s boiling, it’s evaporating, and that evaporation hits the rotary evaporator’s chilled coils and drips into a collection flask. We take that collection flask and we season it with a little bit of salt and sugar, and then set it with gelatin. So, it’s basically pure aroma. You get a condensation water that blows off the stock, and once you season it you have something that’s really really special."

That distilled pie filling is added to gelatin to make the clear pie filling. Get the complete recipe at Vogue. But be warned, after all that work, your traditional family might prefer to look at it rather than eat it. -via Mental Floss

(Image credit: Allen Hemberger/Alinea)


Uncombable Hair Syndrome

A lot of people have curly hair that's hard to comb, but this is something else altogether. Shilah Madison Calvert-Yin has "uncombable hair syndrome," which is a real condition. Each shaft of her hair is triangular instead of round. It's caused by a gene mutation, and is very rare. Only about 100 people in the world have the syndrome. But Shilah's family has embraced her awesome hair.

“Shilah loves her unique hair, but that has come from constant positive reinforcement at home from friends and family,” her mom Celeste Calvert-Yin, who lives in Melbourne Australia, told TODAY via email.

“As a little, little girl she often told us she was like a unicorn as they are very special and unique just like her. It brought a tear to our eye.”  

People often say she has hair like Doc Brown from back to the future, lucky it's one of our fave movies #uncombablehairsyndrome

A post shared by Shilah Madison Calvert-Yin (@shilahmadison) on Jul 12, 2017 at 2:49pm PDT

You can follow 7-year-old Shilah at her Instagram page. -via Boing Boing


The Ornate Bird Palaces of Ottoman-Era Turkey

The huge public buildings the Ottomans built in Turkey were designed to last. And so were the decorative bird houses attached to the outside walls. These birdhouses were works of art as well as sturdy homes for wildlife.  

The birdhouses were not simple concrete structures, but rather elaborate feats of miniature architecture that ranged from one-story homes to multiple-story bird mansions. Each was designed with a similar design aesthetic to the country’s larger buildings, simultaneously providing shelter to sparrows, swallows, and pigeons while preventing bird droppings from corroding the walls of the surrounding architecture.

In addition to providing shelter, the birdhouses fulfilled a religious vision. They were thought to grant good deeds to those that built the tiny homes.

The few surviving Ottoman birdhouses are hundreds of years old. See a gallery of the concrete birdhouses of Turkey at Colossal. -via Nag on the Lake

(Image credit: Caner Cangül)


The Socialite Who Hid in a Dingy Hotel Room for 24 Years

Ida Wood was thought to be a millionaire socialite from New Orleans who married well after she came to New York as a teenager. She married well, alright, but most of her story was untrue. After her husband died and a business venture failed, she moved into a hotel suite in Herald Square with her two sisters and lived there without going out in public for the next 24 years. Then in 1931, she had to get help for her ailing sister, and her reclusive lifestyle was uncovered.

In the days after first reaching out for help, a parade of lawyers, undertakers, purported relatives and hotel staff filtered through suites 551-552. They discovered that the millionairess, once touted in the papers for her fragile beauty, was now stooped and withered, and sported a wild bramble of gray matted hair. She had been living there with her sisters Mary and Emma in near isolation for more than two decades. The rooms were almost entirely filled with refuse; the doctor who came to examine Mary could barely find a place to stand amid piles of old magazines, boxes, suitcases, strange collections of newspaper clippings and bits of cloth.

The sisters didn’t just hoard objects — hidden among the junk was Ida’s entire fortune. Roughly 1 million dollars in cash and jewelry were found in cardboard boxes, trunks and Cracker Jack boxes, and $500,000 was found in an oilskin bag that Ida hid under her skirt.

Ida Wood died the next year, and it came out that her life was even stranger than that of a hoarding recluse. Wood's story is told at Ozy.


Running Into an Old Patient

Dr. Shannon Moore of Hocking Hills Animal Clinic in Logan, Ohio, tells how she ran into a former patient while hiking in the woods. Since she's a veterinarian, there wasn't much conversation, but she did stop to examine how her work was holding up, and take a couple pictures.

Several years ago, a client brought me a box turtle that had been hit by a car. I used fiberglass to repair his broken shell and then released him in my woods. Recently, while walking on my hillside, I spotted an odd pattern in the leaves. To my amazement, there was my old patient with the fiberglass still on... years later! Sometimes, being a vet is the best thing there is.

I can imagine that the turtle has spent his time explaining to his buddies that mesh-and-Bondo is a turtle's best friend. And the vet, too, of course. -via Boing Boing

(Image credit: Hocking Hills Animal Clinic)


Victorian America's Furniture of the Future

George Hunzinger was a 19th-century furniture designer who believed in technology, so much that he filed 21 patents for convertible furniture, including the iconic folding chair we all know and love. He also pioneered furniture that used fabric-covered wire mesh that made pieces much lighter and cooler than regular upholstery. He even created tables that held an extra leaf inside them. But his chairs were still products of their time, which means fancy to our eyes. Barry R. Harwood of the Brooklyn Museum tells us about Hunzinger's innovations.    

In the 1860s, Hunzinger launched his own business, focusing on urban middle-class buyers who wanted novel, fashionable, and versatile items to decorate their homes. Most of Hunzinger’s pieces fell squarely into the emerging field of “patent furniture,” which adopted mechanical improvements to make adjustable, multi-purpose furniture for saving space and improving comfort. “By 1861, he started patenting folding chairs, which became a sort of obsession,” Harwood says. Much like today, convertible furniture—including folding chairs, sofa beds, and card tables—was very appealing to urban residents with limited space.

A Hunzinger patent from 1861 shows why his work was popular with apartment dwellers. It described a folding chair based on the common X-frame shape along with a small attached writing desk. Like this model, many of Hunzinger’s designs were known as “fancy chairs,” or what we’d call accent chairs or conversation pieces today. “In the early 19th century, it usually referred to chairs that had a great deal of hand-painted polychromatic decoration on them,” Harwood says. “For the 19th-century consumer, it meant a singular, unusual chair that you had in the parlor.”

Read more about Hunzinger's furniture, and see plenty of pictures, at Collectors Weekly.

(Image credit: the Brooklyn Museum)
 


15 Secrets of Forensic Artists

Among other tasks, forensic artists take a verbal description from a witness and render a sketch that may help identify a criminal. It's a particularly specific job. Mental Floss talked to three forensic artists (one we've featured here before) to get some insights into what they do. Here's a sample:

2. THEY NEED TO SUPPRESS THEIR CREATIVITY.

It's easy to imagine that forensic artists might remain hunched over a sketch for hours, trying to insert every last dimple and laugh line they could tease out of a witness. Wrong. According to Cooper, trying to create an exact likeness might make a sketch less likely to resonate with the public. “With a highly realistic portrait, someone might see it who knows the person, but if there’s one thing wrong, one detail, they’ll say, ‘Oh, that’s not my buddy,’” Cooper says. “When it’s more sketchy, more scribbled, you’re leaving more open to interpretation.”

7. BIRD NESTS CAN BE A BIG HELP.

For cases where artists are called to help reconstruct the likeness of a decomposed or otherwise de-featured body, Cooper says that a good reference source for bodies found in the woods can often be found in a very unlikely place. “When dealing with a decomposed body, we’d like to get the color of the hair, and a good place to find that is in a bird’s nest nearby,” she says. “Birds love hair.”

Read the other interesting tidbits from forensic artists at Mental Floss.

(Image credit: Ryan Hodnett)


The Tale Of A Man And His Rancor

Rancors are native to the planet Dathomir, grow to be five meters tall or more, and see most humanoids as nothing more than snack food. So how did Jabba's Rancor end up in that pit beneath his palace?

It was given to Jabba as a gift from his henchmen when it was but a wee Rancy Wancy, and the Rancor's keeper Malakili learned to love that big nasty beastie like one of his own...until Luke smashed its head in.

But don't worry, according to this comic by Chris Gugliotti the story of Malakili and the Rancor has a happy ending, and despite the large dent in Rancy's head he's doing fine and eating solid foods again!

-Via Geeks Are Sexy


People Photographed As Young Adults And 100-Year-Olds

It's an indisputable fact that our faces will have changed quite a bit by the time we're old, and if we're lucky enough to live to 100 we wil look virtually unrecognizable compared to our younger selves.

But how much do our faces actually change as we reach ultimate old age?

These incredible photos are part of the "Faces Of Century" series by photographer Jan Langer- a side-by-side comparison of how people who have lived for a century look now compared to how they looked in early adulthood.

The twelve people Jan chose as his subjects were all chosen from his homeland, a dozen people representing the over 1200 centenarians who currently call the Czech Republic home:

Photographs show portraits of one hundred years old Czechs. Nowadays, there are over 1200. In fifty years their number will reach 14,000. How these people see their life after such a period? The majority of those I approached agree that with advancing age life is faster; until, at last, the life will pass in a moment. Time is shrinking, as are the faces of the elders. I wondered what changes and what remains on a human face and in a human mind in such a long time, and in such a short while in relative terms. I wondered how much loneliness of the old age weighs, and what memories stay in 100-year-old mind

See Then & Now: Same People Photographed As Young Adults And 100-Years-Old here


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