The blooming flowers of the hop plant have been crucial to the beer brewing industry since ancient times. In the UK, hops are grown mainly in the Kent region. When harvest time came, there weren't enough local laborers to pick the blossoms, so poor families from London made a pilgrimage every year to pick hops and pick up some extra cash.

By 1870, special trains were being run to transport families to the hop fields. Londoners who could not afford to get out into the country normally looked on harvest time as something of a holiday.

On arrival, though, conditions were squalid. Families lived in barns, tents, stables, even pigsties. Hygiene was poor and disease spread — in 1849 cholera killed 43 hop pickers on a single farm.

In the 1860s, two priests began to visit the hop fields and campaign for improved conditions, eventually forming the Society for Employment and Improved Lodgings for Hop Pickers in 1866.

Whole families worked to pick hops, while only men wore stilts to reach the highest of the vines. The tradition of traveling to Kent to pick hops died out in the 1950s with the arrival of automated picking machines. See a gallery of photographs from the days of the hop pickers at Retronaut. -Thanks, WTM!

Help @handelandhaydn find this "wow" child! Find out more: https://t.co/TsjEQmeSYX pic.twitter.com/CeZcciRM2G

— 99.5 WCRB, Classical Radio Boston (@995WCRB) May 7, 2019

The Handel and Haydn Society orchestra played Mozart's "Masonic Funeral Music" last Sunday at the Boston Symphony Hall. When the last note was done, the entire hall could hear a child exclaim "Wow!" The voice was full of pure appreciation of the music. The audience giggled, then applauded loudly. The society thought it was so charming, they reached out online to find him. And they did. He is 9-year-old Ronan Mattin.

Ronan didn't mean to be disruptive, said his grandfather, Stephen Mattin, who took Ronan to the concert. His grandson, Mattin explained, is on the autism spectrum, and often expresses himself differently than other people.

"I can count on one hand the number of times that [he's] spontaneously ever come out with some expression of how he's feeling," Mattin said.

Ronan has been invited to meet with the Handel and Haydn Society's artistic director and learn more about the orchestra. -via the A.V. Club

Emma H. Schmid was a devout Catholic woman living in Iowa when she was referred to Father Theophilus Riesinger for exorcism in 1928. He observed Emma exhibiting strange physical symptoms such a lumps moving under her skin, and her ability to converse in several languages, some she knew and some she had never learned. He decided to lodge her at a Franciscan convent at St. Joseph Parish in Earling, Iowa.

At St. Joseph’s convent, she wouldn’t touch food that had been secretly blessed; when the sisters brought her an otherwise identical serving without the blessing, she ate. The woman who grew up dreaming of becoming a nun was now living in a convent, but in a state of semi-captivity under the grimmest circumstances.

Only a small circle of trusted people were told what was happening, but keeping Emma’s secret proved difficult. Theo’s notes indicated that “she intermittently roared and bellowed and barked and mauled and moaned and shrieked.” Screams echoed through the neighborhood and into windows. People rushed to the convent asking if someone was being murdered, or a pig slaughtered. Michael Schwarte, then a schoolboy, years later recalled that word got out what was happening. “In a small town like this, everyone knew what was going on.”

Exorcisms were held in a bedroom in the convent. Emma’s teeth gnashed as her arms were bound to the bed frame. Theo would begin with the Litany of All Saints, evoking the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost in the name of Jesus Christ. When Theo recited the words “Lord, save your people from the persecution of the devil,” an agitated voice from Emma moaned and yelped.

Father Theo was convinced that Emma was possessed by multiple demons, and as they were cast out one by one, he also became convinced that she was possessed by benevolent spirits as well, including that of the Virgin Mary. The messages these spirits relayed led Father Theo on a hunt for the Antichrist. Read the story of Emma Schmid's exorcism at Medium. -via Strange Company

(Image credit: Sailko)

Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein was written in 1818 and published in 1820. The book was fiction, but brought questions of science, philosophy, and ethics to the public in a way that dry science explanations could not. However, those discussions on the nature of life and death and what man and his knowledge could do about it were at the very forefront of science at the time, due to some very real experiments similar to Doctor Frankenstein's. Vox tackles how scientists at the time were pushing the limits of life itself, and scaring the daylights out of the rest of us.   

For hundreds of years, critics have been speculating that William Shakespeare did not write all those plays with his name on them. Even his contemporaries suggested he was credited for works that weren't his. But who could the writer have been? The founding artistic director of Shakespeare & Company, Tina Packer, openly wondered why Shakespeare was so far ahead of his contemporaries in his ability to see the world through a woman's eyes. Considering how Shakespeare gave his female characters emotions and ambitions that other (male) writers never approached, could it be possible that the hand that wrote those plays belonged to a woman?  

Long before Tina Packer marveled at the bard’s uncanny insight, others were no less awed by the empathy that pervades the work. “One would think that he had been Metamorphosed from a Man to a Woman,” wrote Margaret Cavendish, the 17th-century philosopher and playwright. The critic John Ruskin said, “Shakespeare has no heroes—he has only heroines.” A striking number of those heroines refuse to obey rules. At least 10 defy their fathers, bucking betrothals they don’t like to find their own paths to love. Eight disguise themselves as men, outwitting patriarchal controls—more gender-swapping than can be found in the work of any previous English playwright. Six lead armies.

The prevailing view, however, has been that no women in Renaissance England wrote for the theater, because that was against the rules.

In an era where 80% of all plays were written anonymously, it would have been a simple matter to feed scripts to an actor with connections, whether he took credit or not. The evidence is speculation, but Elizabeth Winkler at the Atlantic makes a case for an anonymous woman writer of Shakespeare plays, particularly Emilia Bassano. 

(Image credit: Stephen Doyle)

Remember the cats who were pranked by a plush puppy? It seems they got their revenge. Walter Santi's father came home one day and noticed the screened-in porch door was open, and the cat food bin in the cabinet was noticeably lower. So the family reviewed the security footage and saw an invasion of cats had taken place. There were thirteen cats involved, of which only a couple live there! Santi sped up the video and added captions to explain who was who.    

Toby Atticus Fraley, an artist we've featured before, has a new project that you're invited to participate in! None of us will live to see the results, but...

I will be collecting messages from the public that will be stored in two time capsules (one entrusted to the Mayor’s Office of Pittsburgh and the other with The Pittsburgh Cultural Trust). Anyone is welcome to leave any message they feel would be important for an audience to hear in the year 2120. You can talk about the weather, the government, the speed limit on Bigelow Blvd., or whatever the future needs to hear.  

You have a month to determine what will be important for the future to know. Or not, since the messages are not limited to what's important. Read more about Fraley's time capsule project. -Thanks, Toby!

My gut doctor says I'm in trouble for eating too much spaghetti but it's my fav vegetable! pic.twitter.com/Ct51Pnvu2z

— Pazuzu (@ThatPazuzu) May 7, 2019

You've probably seen the internet as in which a "gut doctor" says “I beg Americans to throw out this vegetable now.” The ads are often in a chumbox, which is a slang term for the promoted links often found at the bottom of a webpage. The ads are so ubiquitous that they've become a meme. What vegetable could that be? The pictures vary, and are hard to decipher. The answer is actually quite elusive. See, chumbox links fall into five categories: they go to search results, or affiliate marketing links, or long slideshows, or advertisements, or hidden content.

The gut doctor falls into the fifth category, hidden content: These ads redirect someplace totally unexpected, a website unrelated in any obvious way to what you originally clicked, and lead you on a wild goose chase between loosely connected sites that are also littered with ads.

The identity of the vegetable is still a question with no answer. However, Kaitlyn Tiffany took a deep dive and found the "gut doctor" the ads refer to. Read about him, and about the business of chumboxes at Vox.

Mali was the heart of a wealthy empire in medieval times, with vast natural resources and traders traveling through the Sahara. Emperor Mansa Musa, who ruled in the 13th and 14th centuries, was one of the richest people ever. An archeological discovery in 2005 now reveals more about the way Mali handled gold. Ancient coin molds were found at Tadmekka, Mali, that contain residual drops of gold and glass shards that were used in the gold purification process.  

"This is the first time in the archaeological record that we saw glass being used to be able to refine gold,” says Marc Walton, codirector of the Center for Scientific Studies in the Arts, a collaboration between Northwestern University and the Art Institute of Chicago. “The glass appeared to be material that was [actually] recycled glass materials … so it really shows the industriousness and creativity of the craftsmen, who understood the properties of gold and glass enough to [use them for] this process of refining gold.” The recycled glass materials were remnants of broken vessels. Tadmekka was a town right in the middle of the trans-Saharan caravan route, so Nixon uncovered several types of material culture that had to do with trade, namely molds for “bald dinar,” or coins that hadn’t been stamped with the name of a mint (or a 10th-century equivalent of one).

Walton's team tested the glass purification theory by doing it themselves, on a small scale, and it worked. Read about the Malian glass purification process at Atlas Obscura. 

You think your cooler or dumpster is bear-resistant? Only if it's certified by the Bear and Wolf Discovery Center in Montana. They test products by letting the bears have at it, which is really the only way to be sure. When you see something that says "this product was not tested on animals," think about the products that are tested BY animals! -via Metafilter

We think of a kitchen as a standard part of a home, but like the bathroom, it wasn't always so for most working class families. Without plumbing, there were no sinks, and many homes had one stove or fireplace that was used for both heating and cooking. The concept of a room dedicated to food preparation really took off after World War I, when plumbing became more common, communities were wired for electricity, and factories produced amazing modern appliances to furnish the kitchen. That was all fine and good, but what about small city apartments that had to be retrofitted? Or even new apartments that were expected to have kitchens in a very limited space? Enter architect Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky, who was charged with designing liveable yet affordable apartments for German cities rebuilding after the Great War.  Her 1926 "Frankfurt Kitchen" became the model for efficient housing across the globe.  

Schütte-Lihotzky conceived of the Frankfurt Kitchen as a separate room in each apartment, which was a design choice that had previously applied only to the cavernous kitchens that served great houses. She used a sliding door to separate it from the main living space. She read Frederick and Taylor’s works translated into German, and even conducted her own time and motion studies.

And presaging the work of American designers Norman Bel Geddes and Raymond Loewy, who drew inspiration from trains and cars in designing their streamlined kitchen appliances in the 1930s, Schütte-Lihotzky found a model of culinary efficiency in the kitchens of railway dining cars designed by the Mitropa catering company. Though tiny, the cars served scores of diners using an extremely small galley space—a term we still used to describe apartment kitchens today.

But we don't use the term Frankfurt Kitchen, and few people know of Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky. The reason can be summed up as the Nazis. Read about Schütte-Lihotzky and the evolution of modern kitchen design at City Lab. -via Digg

The invasive plant kudzu was introduced to the US from Japan at an international exposition, and we've been making jokes about it in the South ever since. It grows uncontrollably in the summer and covers any property that isn't mowed or otherwise tended. Japanese knotweed was also brought from Japan to an exhibition and then was found to be terribly invasive in climates too cool for kudzu. But knotweed is harder to control and does a lot more damage.  

Along streams and rivers, knotweed grows into a wall that hides the water. Along roads, its arching canes can make it hard to see around bends. In Bronx River Forest, knotweed once grew so thick that driving along its paths was “like being in a knotweed carwash,” New York City conservation manager Michael Mendez told me. “There were people living in the knotweed,” he recalled. It was a good place to hide.

Knotweed can grow through cracks in cement, between floorboards, and out from the joints in a stone wall. “You can see it everywhere, along the roadside, in every city,” said Jatinder Aulakh, an assistant weed scientist at the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station. In the landscapes it has infested, it is impossible to imagine what was there before—and harder still to foresee a future without it. “There is no insect, pest, or disease in the United States,” Aulakh said, “that can keep it in check.”

You can cut it, pull it, and dig it up, but all it takes is a tiny piece of the root remaining to propagate into another plant. Knotweed is so hard to kill that its presence will affect property values. Read about the spread of Japanese knotweed at Slate. -via Boing Boing 

(Image credit: U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service - Northeast Region)

Nas Alhusain amusingly illustrates the different kinds of people who put off doing what they should be doing, and the ways they do it. It took him a long time to finish the video, because he kept putting it off. What kind of procrastinator are you? I'm the kind who gets distracted, and then doesn't realize how much time goes by. -via Laughing Squid

Dog fighting, along with other blood sports, was a lucrative pastime in London in the early 1800s. Those who bet on the outcomes made those who staged the matches quite wealthy, for little to no effort. The animals were the ones who paid the price. But the animal that brought the sport to light was not a dog, but a monkey! Jacco was a violent monkey, believed to be a macaque, who overtook the sport in the 1820s.  

Jacco reportedly defeated 14 dogs during his time in the Pit. His technique? Jumping on their backs, thus avoiding the jaws, and going for the throat, “clawing and biting away,” Lennox wrote, “which usually occupied him about one minute and a half, and if his antagonist was not speedily withdrawn, his death was certain. The monkey exhibited a frightful appearance, being deluged with blood — but it was that of his opponent alone …”

In other accounts, Jacco was given a stick to defend himself against the trained canines. It’s this version that was favored by the New Hampshire rock band Scissorfight, which released the song “The Ballad of Jacco Macacco” in 1999. “I think it’s entirely probable if such a thing was available, he would have used it,” Griggs says of the stick story.

Jacco's backstory varied according to who was doing the telling, but you can read a few versions of the monkey's adventures, and the influence he had on dog fighting even after his final defeat, at Ozy.

The big summer hit of 1999 was The Mummy starring Brendan Frasier. It wasn't just a horror film, like the earlier mummy movies, but an action movie with a generous dose of comedy. Of course it was a hit, maybe because it used some really safe themes and tropes that had been tested 18 years earlier, and even long before that. Hey, you can't go wrong doing what's been done before, as Hollywood discovered long ago.