In 1833, Abraham Lincoln was a 24-year-old postmaster in New Salem, Illinois. His friend Elizabeth Abell introduced him to her sister, Mary Owens, who was visiting from Kentucky. Afterward, he remarked to Abell that if Owens were to return to Illinois, he'd marry her. It was most likely a throwaway line, but Abell told Owens, and she paid another visit to New Salem in 1836, considering herself therefore engaged. By then, Lincoln was not at all on board with the idea of marrying her. He wrote to another friend:

“I knew she was over-size, but she now appeared a fair match for Falstaff. I knew she was called an ‘old maid,’ and I felt no doubt of the truth of at least half of the appellation. But now, when I beheld her, I could not for my life avoid thinking of my mother. And this, not from withered features, for her skin was too full of fat to permit its contracting in to wrinkles; but from her want of teeth, weather-beaten appearance in general, and from a kind of notion that ran in my head, that nothing could have commenced at the size of infancy, and reached her present bulk in less than thirty-five or forty years; and, in short, I was not all pleased with her.”

To be clear, Owens was the same age as Lincoln. Lincoln was not so brutally honest with Owens, but neither did he diplomatically break off the "engagement." Instead, he corresponded with her about the dire circumstances she would find herself in if they married. His ruse worked so well that Lincoln himself suffered from the way the relationship ended. Read the story of Abraham Lincoln and Mary Owens at Atlas Obscura.

Caretakers believe this is the first time "Tyson" the Tiger stepped on grass! The big cat was found in a small travel cage inside an abandoned #Houston home. Today he's safe at a @HumaneSociety rehab in #HendersonCounty #wfaa @KHOU #AnimalAbuse pic.twitter.com/7c21xEKpwG

— Sebastian Robertson (@wfaasebastian) February 13, 2019

Animal control officers, working on tips, found a tiger kept in the garage of an abandoned home in Houston on Monday. It is illegal to keep exotic pets in the city. The tiger was tranquilized and then transferred to the BARC Animal Shelter in its cage, which must have been the most exciting day at the Houston pound in recent memory. On Tuesday, the tiger had already found a home, and was shipped to the Cleveland Amory Black Beauty Ranch, which is equipped to handle exotic animals, including big cats.

An anonymous tipster reported seeing the animal about a week ago, according to BARC.

The tipster said they were at the house to smoke marijuana and thought they were hallucinating when they first saw the tiger, according to police.

The tiger was found in a "rinky-dink" cage in the garage, which was not locked, police said. The garage was secured with a screwdriver and a nylon strap, according to police.

Police are investigating to find the owner of the property and the tiger. -Thanks, WTM!

Before Homeland Security, before discount airlines, before even World War II, commercial flying was very different from what we know today. A passenger without a ticket or even identification could be tolerated occasionally, especially if she had fur and whiskers. And that is the story of Strato Lizzie, born in 1940, just a year after LaGuardia Field was opened.    

Strato Lizzie acquired her wings and began her flying career in Los Angeles. According to the story, an American Airlines pilot found her as a kitten behind an ash can in an alleyway and turned her over to W.P. Spencer, a Civil Aeronautics Authority pilot.

Spencer flew the kitty to Kansas City, and then from there she flew to the new LaGuardia Field with a message from the chief of the Kansas City office: “The kitten apparently loves flying. Therefore, I am giving it a ride to New York and back.”
Strato Lizzie on her flight to LaGuardia AirfieldHere’s Strato Lizzie as a kitten on one of her first flights from Kansas City to New York with pilot Bronson White.

Poor Strato Lizzie was tossed around like a hot potato for a while, traveling from New York to Chicago and then back to Los Angeles. Finally, when she was about six months old, the pretty kitty was adopted by the TWA pilots at LaGuardia.

That was only the beginning of Strato Lizzie's adventures, which included cat shows, kittens, going missing, publicity, and over 100,000 miles of flights. Read her story at The Hatching Cat. -via Strange Company

She said she wanted tulips for Valentines Day; he was sleepy and thought she said turnips. So Allan Harris of Hartford, Kentucky, went above and beyond the call of duty and made sure his wife Nina got a whole bucket of turnips as a token of his love, presented in a special Valentine bucket. Nina was confused at first, but appreciated Allan's efforts. She later received tulips as well, plus a balloon. -via Metafilter

What we know as panthers, such as Bagheera from The Jungle Book, are big cats, usually jaguars or leopards, that have a gene mutation affecting color. While 11% of leopards have this melanism, most of them are in Asia (like Bagheera). You may be surprised to learn that the last confirmed evidence of a black leopard in Africa was in Ethiopia in 1909! That is, until now. Reports of a black leopard sighting in Kenya drew scientist Nick Pilfold of the San Diego Zoo to investigate. He took along a team of biologists and wildlife photographer Will Burrard-Lucas, who long dreamed of capturing images of a black panther.

"For me, no animal is shrouded in more mystery, no animal more elusive, and no animal more beautiful," he posted on his blog. "For many years, they remained the stuff of dreams and of farfetched stories told around the campfire at night. Nobody I knew had ever seen one in the wild and I never thought that I would either."

Burrard-Lucas said he shot the images at Laikipia Wilderness Camp using a Camtraptions Camera, which focuses on wildlife photography and footage. The cameras were placed near animal trails, and water sources such as pools and natural springs. They were left on 24 hours a day in most places but were only turned on at night in public places, according to the African Journal of Ecology.  

Read more about the mission to document the panther at CNN. See more pictures of the black leopard in Will Burrard-Lucas' Instagram gallery. -via The Root

The last time we saw Lucas the Spider, it was right before Christmas, and he had made a new friend. The fly had one request:"Don't eat me!" Lucas wouldn't do that, but he does want to share food with his new buddy. In this video, they go over their choices of food available in the house. -via Tastefully Offensive

People don't need words to vocalize emotions. Wordless sounds will do just fine in many cases. Researchers from the University of California, Berkeley, have catalogued these vocalizations that convey emotion.  

To start things off, the researchers asked 56 people, some professional actors and some not, to react to different emotional scenarios. From these reactions, the team recorded more than 2,000 vocal bursts. Next, they used Amazon Mechanical Turk, a website that enables you to outsource tasks you can’t relegate to computers, to recruit more than 1,000 people to listen to the recordings. As the recruits listened, the researchers had them rate the vocalizations based on the emotions and tone (positive or negative) they thought the clips conveyed.

Previous studies had pegged the number of emotions we can express with vocal bursts at around 13. But when the UC Berkeley team analyzed their results, they found there are at least 24 distinct ways that humans convey meaning without words.

You can read more about the research here. But what's really fun is to listen to those vocalizations in an interactive map. Moving your mouse over a colored spot will produce that vocalization, so sweeping across many will fill your speakers with emotional crowd noises. Have fun, but heed my advice and don't stay too long in one region without venturing to the others, because some of these vocalizations can make you feel things. -via Metafilter

The weirdest job you ever had is no match for what Weird Al Yankovic used to do when he was young. But then, this is Weird Al, so being an accordion repo man may not have been his weirdest job. Still, it was weird enough for him to imagine Accordion Repo Man as an action hero in a movie. A very weird movie. -via Laughing Squid

San Francisco's history has some startling touchstones that, lucky for us, were documented in photography, from the Gold Rush that brought people from all over the world to the San Francisco earthquake in 1906. Los Angeles had its own milestones during that time, growing from a beach paradise to a megalopolis. The photographers who documented those changes did not have an easy time of it. The California Historical Society has an exhibition open through March entitled Boomtowns: How Photography Shaped Los Angeles and San Francisco. The society's managing curator,  Erin Garcia, gives us some insight into how those photographs were made.

“I think the earliest and best example of Californians pushing the limits of photography is probably Carleton Watkins having a custom-made, cabinet-sized camera built to take with him to Yosemite in 1861,” Garcia says. “The literature suggests that he wanted his photographs to be hung on walls, to be framed and viewed like large paintings. There was no way to enlarge a photo at the time, so the way you got a bigger picture was to use a bigger negative. And to get a bigger negative you had to have a bigger camera, so Watkins used this gigantic custom-made camera with glass plates he had to haul all the way to Yosemite. It was just so absurd.”

Besides carrying unwieldy equipment out into the California wilderness, Watkins would have had to coat each massive glass plate with a sticky collodion solution and develop them in his darkroom tent. Watkins also captured panoramic shots of San Francisco; the resulting mammoth-plate albumen prints, at around 14 inches high by 20 inches wide, give firsthand viewers an impressive window into the period that can’t be replicated by copies online or in print.

Meanwhile, Muybridge was working to perfect complex panoramas and improve shutter speeds so he could stop motion entirely. “The technology that he pushed, it’s just absolutely incredible,” Garcia says. “We have a 360-degree panorama on view taken from the Mark Hopkins residence on Nob Hill. Muybridge had to figure out how to make a 360-degree view, which no one had really done, though there had been some attempts. It was a very tricky thing to do because you would have to divide the horizon into equal parts, and then, on the ground glass, which is showing you a picture upside down, you’d have to somehow get the horizon lines to align. You’d have to manage the sunlight, always keeping the sun at your back so that your camera’s not looking directly into the sun. It would’ve taken many hours, so it was an incredible logistical and technical accomplishment.”

Read more about the photographers who gave us images of the history of California at Collectors Weekly. Yes, there are plenty of pictures.

Flowers, cards, jewelry, and dinner out are standard romantic gifts, but nothing says Valentine's Day like assorted chocolates in a heart-shaped box. But why? Chocolates are appreciated by the receiver, but other treats would be, too. And how did a heart-shaped box become standard? Why do we even associate love with a shape that doesn't much resemble the heart, anyway?

This has not always been the case. Eric Jager, the author of The Book of the Heart and a medieval literature professor at UCLA, traces the link back to the 13th and 14th centuries. “[People at that time] thought of our hearts” — the physical ones — “as books of memory, a place where God’s commands are written, and [believed] feelings for the beloved were somehow written on your heart,” he told Time. There are stories about female saints, whose hearts, cut open after death, were literally inscribed with professions of love for God.

But then where did the shape come from? It’s not, one might note, quite similar to what human hearts look like, although, as cardiologist and medical illustrator Carlos Machado told Time, it isn’t all that different either. Really, he says, the shape is closer to a bird or reptile heart, which makes sense, given that the medieval study of anatomy was based on animal bodies rather than human ones.  

The story of the heart-shaped box of chocolates requires a separate history for the heart, the chocolates, the box, and Valentines day itself. These varying stories intersected in the mid-1800s, in a tale you can read at Vox.  -via Digg

(Image credit: Chrys Omori) 

To the robot who turned 90 days into 15 years of exploration:

You were, and are, the Opportunity of a lifetime.

Rest well, rover. Your mission is complete.

(2004-2019)https://t.co/POzRmYauHo#ThanksOppy pic.twitter.com/oZLBc7XMJD

— Spirit and Oppy (@MarsRovers) February 13, 2019

 
In 2003, NASA Launched two Mars rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, only three weeks apart. Both rovers landed in 2004, and both were expected to relay data and images back to earth for 90 days. But the little rovers surprised everyone, and continued working far beyond their expected lifespans. Spirit became stuck in the soft soil in 2009, but continued its mission of geologic analysis and communications for another year. In 2011, NASA declared its mission over. The Opportunity rover continued working for a record 14 years, and was the robot that discovered evidence of water on Mars. But today NASA has announced its mission has ended.  

The cause was system failure precipitated by power loss during a catastrophic, planetwide dust storm that engulfed the Mars rover last summer.

“It’s going to be very sad to say goodbye,” said John Callas, the mission’s project manager. “But at the same time, we’ve got to remember this has been 15 years of incredible adventure.”

Opportunity’s mission was planned to last just 90 days, but it worked for 5,000 Martian “sols” (which are about 39 minutes longer than an Earth day) and traversed more than 28 treacherous miles — two records for NASA.

“It will be a very long time,” Callas predicted, “before any other mission exceeds that duration or distance on the surface of another world.”

Read the history of the Mars Opportunity rover at The Washington Post. 

Discover magazine has eulogies for Opportunity from a variety of scientists.

The New York Times has an interactive look at Opportunity's work on Mars.

Randall Munroe of xkcd has a tribute to Opportunity today. See Munroe's previous comics on on Spirit and Opportunity. 

NASA has more.

-via Metafilter

Russia's timeline in World War II is confusing enough, but its role in World War I was even more so. While most European countries were fighting each other, Russia had their own civil war, which lasted years and split the country into partisans, each with their own army: the Bolsheviks had the Red Army and the loose coalition of partisans opposing them had the White Army. And as the Great War ended, American troops were still in Russia.

When [President Woodrow] Wilson sent the troops to Russia in July 1918, World War I still looked dire for the Allies. With the Russian Empire no longer engaged in the continental struggle, Germany had moved dozens of divisions to France to try to strike a final blow and end the war, and the spring 1918 German offensive had advanced to within artillery range of Paris.

Desperate to reopen an Eastern Front, Britain and France pressured Wilson to send troops to join Allied expeditions in northern Russia and far eastern Russia, and in July 1918, Wilson agreed to send 13,000 troops. The Allied Powers hoped that the White Russians might rejoin the war if they defeated the Reds.

To justify the small intervention, Wilson issued a carefully worded, diplomatically vague memo. First, the U.S. troops would guard giant Allied arms caches sent to Archangel and Vladivostok before Russia had left the war. Second, they would support the 70,000-man Czechoslovak Legion, former prisoners of war who had joined the Allied cause and were fighting the Bolsheviks in Siberia. Third, though the memo said the U.S. would avoid “intervention in [Russia’s] internal affairs,” it also said the U.S. troops would aid Russians with their own “self-government or self-defense.” That was diplomacy-speak for aiding the White Russians in the civil war.

The US troops charged with fighting the Red Army in 1919 didn't understand why they were there, and neither did US politicians back home. American units were stationed at Archangel, in the Arctic Circle, and in the far east of Siberia, where the Japanese were making advances in the wake of Russia's upheaval. Read about the American involvement in the Russian Revolution at Smithsonian.

In our first glimpse of Disney's Frozen 2, Elsa tries to conquer the sea. It looks like a journey of some kind, with Anna and Kristoff going along with her. We'll have to wait until November to know for sure, just in time to buy Frozen toys for a new generation of kids for Christmas.

Two LEGO minifigs live in the playroom, of course, so what we start off with is toys playing with toys. But Mike and Jay want to see what's outside of that room, and plan their great escape. But can they get past the feline monster that's guarding the house? -via Laughing Squid

Aspen is a skier's paradise, with 375 world-class lifts and pistes, luxury resorts, and a reputation for exclusivity driven by sky-high prices. Aspen Mountain has 135 ski instructors, and all are hired out as private instructors- no group lessons here. They are an elite group of professionals, with many world-class athletes and former Olympians among them. They already know about skiing. What they learn in Aspen is about how the rich and famous do a ski vacation.

“People are awfully particular about their special requests,” says Olga Lawson, the on-snow coordinator at Aspen Mountain. Among the common asks? “Blond instructors, please,” “Olympic medalists only,” or “Someone who likes to drink.” Once, a sixtysomething skier split up with her coach midmountain, marched back down to the ski school, and asked for a new pro “who was loose.”

Even still, the most frequent request is simple on the surface: People want “a fun young guy,” or as Lawson interprets it, a handsome Australian or New Zealander in his 20s or 30s. (Women want to date them; men want to bro out with them.)

“We also get tons of requests for instructors with French accents,” says Lawson, adding that many clients want to practice their foreign language skills before heading to Courchevel or Megève. She jokes, “It’s like two lessons for the price of one!”   

Well, the "price of one" starts at $820 a day, and with tips, ski instructors do well in Aspen. They all have stories to tell about their clients, although some are unnamed. Read about the work of an Aspen ski instructor at Bloomberg.

(Image credit: Zohar Lazar)