As the 2024 Olympics Games are about to start in Paris today, let’s look back to the time when Ash Ketchum was the Indigo League torchbearer. The clip shows Ash asking to volunteer but if you know the episode, you’ll know it wasn’t all plain sailing. Let’s hope it is for the IRL torchbearers including… Snoop Dogg?! What a time to be alive.
Atlas Obscura compiled a list of the 14 best spots for tea lovers, including places in California, London, Glasgow, and Sylhet.
Morgan Spurlock’s brought attention to his infamous documentary, Super Size Me, where he went on a diet of nothing but McDonald’s and had to Super Size his meal whenever asked. It caused controversy and McDonald’s made a number of changes off the back of it. But for many years later, it was debunked and scrutinised for being biased and not telling the whole truth—notably that Spurlock was an alcoholic and that significantly impacted the results.
Weird History Food those lies and biases further and while eating like this isn’t good for you, neither is lying. Or sexual assaulting women. Yeah, he did that too.
Following on from another peculiar Alaskan thing, Miss Cellania posted about a tradition in the town of Glacier View where people launched driverless cars (no, not Teslas!):
In the small town of Glacier View (population 375), Alaska, they’ve held a unique Fourth of July celebration since 2006. In midsummer, the sun stays out too late for fireworks, so instead they launch cars off a cliff and watch them soar through the air before crashing on the beach below.
If there’s any way for Americans to go above and beyond the worst possible thing, they’ll take it there. Fireworks aren’t enough so they have to throw cars off cliffs. For their “independence” day. Wild.
Fourth of July related: A bunch of wild 4th of July accidents
Arch Daily wrote about the Burj Al Babas project, launched in 2014 in the Turkish town of Mudurnu. The area was filled with Disneyesque castles for rich people but the fairytale soon descended into a Márquezian nightmare filled with abandonment:
In 2018, as the global real estate market and economy deteriorated, and the Turkish lira depreciated, Sarot Group found itself burdened with debt and declared bankruptcy. They abandoned 587 units that were under construction. In the subsequent years, the company repeatedly expressed hopes of resuming the project, even mentioning prospects of selling another 100 castles to help settle debts, but this never materialized.
Six years later, the nearly 600 abandoned castles create a surreal scene, as if Disney had imagined a princess tale in a dystopian future. Beyond the ghost town ambiance, the mini-castles provoke reflections on kitsch architecture, parodying an ideal of luxury and romance until it loses meaning. Amidst blue-turreted towers and small ogival windows, Burj Al Babas’ castles materialize a strange intersection of mass culture elements and a desire for ostentatious grandeur, embodying a pop realism that promotes artificiality, reinforces stereotypes, and leans towards pastiche—a decontextualized imitation of elements. The sales success of these castles also reflects a contemporary consumer profile favoring imported aesthetics over authentic expressions.
In Alaska, there’s an abandoned igloo-shaped dome called Igloo City.
It was built as a hotel in the 70s but developers never finished it and as time went on, the structure deteriorated to the point that it wasn’t worth fixing. So it’s just… stayed there, abandoned and decrepit. As with many abandoned building projects, it’s had a variety of different owners over the years (you can read an interview with its current owners on Curious Alaska) so who knows whether it’ll be open for vacancies.
As for the structure itself, it’s 4 stories tall, made of concrete, and the interior is full of concentric beams of timber. It kind of reminded me of The Globe Theatre in London but you wouldn’t find Shakespeare anywhere near The Last Frontier.
Alaska related: Why are some Alaskan rivers turning orange?
For Variety Fair, Alfred Molina broke down some of his greatest roles and discussed his life in between them. He’s such an underrated actor with a brilliant range and I enjoyed watching this. There’s also a really candid moment at the end where he talks about his dad and I’m sure a lot of people will relate to his anecdotes.
A while back I wrote about how you can eat banana peels. Well, some chefs from a London restaurant called Fallow decided to make a zero-waste banana dessert and included the peel to make “caramelised banana skin crisps”. It looks amazing and a great way to use all parts of a fruit. The peel might be biodegradable but it’s much better in your stomach, right?
Banana related: turning banana stems into useful fibres in Uganda and a brilliant banana bread bottom cheesecake
Kiosk: The Last Modernist Booths Across Central and Eastern Europe is a book about kiosks, those little shops you see dotted around European cities, selling everything from magazines to tobacco, chocolate, water, and chewing gum. Zupagrafika created the photobook to showcase these little buildings of convenience in all their wild and wonderful designs:
Mass-produced from the 1970s to the 1990s, modular kiosks like the seminal K67, designed by the Slovenian architect Saša J. Mächtig, and similar systems – including the Polish Kami, the Macedonian KC190, and the Soviet ‘Bathyscaphe’ – could be found anywhere throughout the former Eastern Bloc and ex-Yugoslav countries, from bustling city squares to socialist-era housing estates. They served as hot dog and Polish zapiekanka joints, farm egg and rotisserie chicken vendors, funeral flower shops, newsstands, car park booths, currency exchange offices, and more.
While this book covers European variants, kiosks originate from Persia where they were small pavilions and spread to India and Turkey from the 13th century.
In 1989, Craig Hickman released a drawing program called Kid Pix for the Macintosh. Hickman said that his son inspired him to create it after struggling with MacPaint and he wanted something that was simpler to use for all children. Naturally, you can’t get it nowadays but we now have a JS-powered version of KidPix which is free to use. And you can save your creations to share with the world!
I found this list of Hurricane Beryl resources on Tumblr. Consider donating if you can and peep the reading list from Caribbean and Caribbean diaspora authors at the bottom of the document. (via)
I have no skin in the game when it comes to 4th of July so I found a suitable video by Mojo to recognise the day: lots of explosions and how they went wrong. Can’t get more American than that!
Yesterday, @xanindigo.bsky.social and @nameshiv.bsky.social taught me that not only did 7-Up used to contain lithium (specifically lithium citrate, a mood-stabilizing drug) but there was also a fake medicine called RadiThor that contained radium.
The Conversation wrote about RadiThor in 2016 and its most notable drinker, Eben Byers:
In the end, Byers’ RadiThor addiction killed him. Unfortunately, ingested radium gets incorporated into bone and all of its radiation energy is, therefore, deposited in bone tissue. Over time, the radium delivered a whopping radiation dose to Byers’ skeleton. He developed holes in his skull, lost most of his jaw and suffered a variety of other bone-related illnesses. Ultimately, he died a gruesome death on March 31, 1932.
When Byers died, he was put to rest in a lead-lined coffin, to block the radiation being released from the bones in his body. Thirty-three years later, in 1965, an MIT scientist, Robley Evans, exhumed Byers’ skeleton to measure the amount of radium in his bones. Radium has a half-life of 1,600 years, so Byers’ bones would have had virtually the same amount of radium in them as they did on the day he died.
[…]
Ultimately, in the interest of protecting public health, the federal government closed down the Bailey Radium Laboratories – the company that made RadiThor – and radium-containing energy drinks disappeared from the consumer market by 1932.
Nowadays, caffeine is the drug of choice for energy drinks. It won’t erode your jaw away but it can certainly give your heart a workout so take care!
Related: JSTOR Daily asks ‘who took the cocaine out of Coca-Cola?’
Why are some Alaskan rivers turning orange? Atlas Obscura investigated: The reason for the change in color was as alarming as its hue: The waters are rusting.
I think I found this on MLTSHP but can’t remember now. Someone’s been painting rainbows on abandoned houses in Asheville, North Carolina. ABC News 13 called it vandalism but the house is being demolished anyway:
The property was recently acquired by Pisgah Legal Services, a nonprofit that assists Western North Carolina residents with free civil legal aid and anti-poverty advocacy. Because the house is a safety hazard, it is scheduled for demolition next week. The demolition, however, was planned before the painting occurred.
“We are allies to the LGBTQ+ community, so we certainly don’t want folks to think the house is being destroyed because of the rainbow design,” said Evie White, communications director for Pisgah Legal Services. “That is certainly not the case.”
Let the LGBTQ+ community have this without criminal accusations, you bums! (News 13, not Pisgah Legal Services)