Cool Things In Random Places

They may be the most stylish carpenters in the world.

They are Journeymen – Gesellen. Since the 13th century, these young German tradesmen have gone ‘auf der Walz,‘ or taken to the road with little more than a walking stick and their tools. Then, as now, they always were their trademark, tailored Kluft: bellbottom pants, double-breasted vests with gigantic buttons, and a black slouch hat. In modern times, fedoras are very popular.

They wander the earth, for at least three years, doing their job. Stonemasons ogle the technique of Angkor Wat in Cambodia, and carpenters survey the Imperial Palace in Tokyo. They take odd jobs, and are often put up and supported by strangers, cafe owners and farmers who are inevitably impressed with their skills. They’re almost always the most interesting people at parties.

There are rules. No Journeyman can come home: not within fifty kilometers of their hometown. No cell phones. Always wear the Kluft – of which they have a second, less expensive pair, for work. And it may or may not be a rule to look fantastically snazzy at all times.

In the whole world, there are only hundreds left: estimates range from 250 to 600. And yet, if you ask, many of them have tales of running into each other – from Morocco to New Zealand.

Local bushmen call it, ‘The Land God Made in Anger.’

You could land on Namibia’s Skeleton Coast – but you couldn’t leave it. Sailors would be pushed ashore in heavy surf – sometimes in dense ocean fog, to boot – and beach themselves. The next morning, they would realize that they were surrounded, by nothing but a hundred miles of the world’s harshest desert.

One WWII cargo ship, the MV Dunedin Star, crash-landed in 1942 – as did every attempt at rescue. One rescue tug smashed on the rocks, drowning its crew. A bomber, dropping supplies to the survivors, crashed into the ocean. But those pilots actually made it ashore, even managing to join up with the survivors of the Star. The entire ragged convoy reached Namibia’s capital city, Windhoek, one month later.

These days, the Skeleton Coast is a national park. Over a thousand ships are still rusting in the dunes.

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It’s a beauty pageant. With muskrats.

The Miss Outdoors Pageant has been a long-running staple of Golden Hill, Maryland. As it happened, this beauty pageant shared the stage with another contest: the World Championship Muskrat Skinning Contest, which drew crowds of hundreds. The contests usually take place, back-to-back. But these days, some contestants decided to enjoy the best of both worlds.

Tiffany Brittingham did in first, in 2003: skinned a muskrat, in the pageant’s talent portion, while dressed in sparkly earrings and full make-up. Now a 6th-grade teacher, she was actually the subject of the documentary, ‘Muskrat Lovely,’ filmed in 2004. Brittingham finally won the beauty pageant in 2005, during which a man yelled from the audience, ‘I want to marry you.’

All of this makes perfect sense, in Chesapeake marsh country. The traditions are fading, of course: many lifelong muskrat trappers have had to find office jobs. But in 2008, 16-year old Dakota Abbott won both the Miss Outdoors contest on Friday. And the next day, she won the Woman’s Junior World Championship, by skinning two muskrats in a mere 102 seconds.

It’s the deepest man-made hole in the world: over seven miles.

Soviet Russia wanted to go deeper. By the time it closed up shop in 1994, the Kola Superdeep Borehole had worked its way through one-third of the continental crust. Even after pioneering new methods of drilling, that was as far as they could go: after a certain point, the earth’s molten crust acts almost like liquid plastic, closing up any hole they would make.

They took core samples all the way along, and geologists were agog. Miles below the surface, they found water – but not free water, like you can find in any earthly ocean. Instead, the ungodly pressure of the earth just squeezed together hydrogen and oxygen atoms – until water molecules had no choice, but to exist. They also kept on finding fossils – four miles down.

America once tried to do the same: they tried drilling straight into the sea floor, under two miles of water. They only got six hundred feet. The project was known simply as, ‘Project Mohole.’

“To be asleep, but present.”

This is the Japanese art – or gift – of ‘inemuri.’ In the most sleep-deprived nation on Earth, the Japanese talent for falling asleep anywhere – on trains, in elevators, during meetings – is both necessary, and admired. In Japan’s workaholic culture, falling asleep out of exhaustion is a testament to hard-work: only slackers get a full night’s sleep.

There are still rules. Try to keep upright – no lounging. And inemuri is particularly encouraged for the folks on the lowest and highest ends of the totem pole – middle managers miss out. But beyond that, Japan doesn’t observe the same sleep taboo that exists in much of the Western world. As long as it doesn’t ‘endanger the social situation,’ a power nap is hardly ever out of the question.

And, yes: people fake it. But even when Japanese workers are genuinely sleep, they still seem to maintain their composure: somehow, no commuter ever seems to sleep through their stop.

A Czech-American artist started his own reliquary.

He had plenty of raw material: he lived in New York City. Through friends and friends of friends, he began to collect bits and pieces of celebrity which – through the magic of relics – were themselves imbued with the bizarre power of fame. In this way, Barton Lidice Benes collected everything from Bill Clinton’s half-sucked throat lozenge to a twig from Mao Tse-Tung’s broom.

Once word got out, he began to receive bits of history in the mail. Fragments of TWA Flight 800. Charred nails from the Branch Davidian compound in Waco. Oil from Exxon Valdez, ash from Mount St. Helens, and a mosaic tile from Pompeii. Each piece is preserved and presented like a saintly relic. Benes’ collection – willed to the North Dakota Museum of Art – ranges from the macabre to the absurd.

Included is a pressed rose – one stolen from a memorial garden, by the artist himself. The garden in question was planted in the memory of Lidice, a Czech town that no longer exists – it was destroyed by the Communists. It is the artist’s middle name, given to him by his father, so that he wouldn’t forget.

A Latvian man built a castle. By himself.

It was meant as a a monument to his lost love, his ‘Sweet Sixteen.’ Lovelorn in his native Latvia, Edward Leedskalnin fled for Florida, where he spent the next thirty years, building. He worked for most of every day, subsisting mostly on sardines and crackers. In his spare time, he read up on magnetic currents.

Astronomical motifs – crescent moons, planets, etc.- festoon the grounds. The ‘Coral Castle’ has heart-shaped tables, multi-ton rocking chairs, and ramparts several feet thick. And one of the main doors – weighing several tons – is so perfectly balanced that it opens with the push of a finger.

No one ever saw Ed at work. Engineers, let alone the lay public, are a mite confused about how a five feet man lugged over a thousand tons of coral. When asked, he simply said knew the principles of leverage pretty well. And as for carving it? Coral has been known to break the tools of jewelers.

Dubai has enlisted Rem Koolhaus for their masterpiece.

It will have the density of Manhattan, on an artificial island. Minaret-inspired towers will stretch eighty stories into the air. Mosques will dot the landscape, abutting a gigantic 44-story sphere. The whole thing would be ringed by a boardwalk, except in the northeast: there, the grid system would dissolve, into a traditional souk, filled with back alleys and shortcuts.

If anyone can do it, it’s Dubai. In recent years, Dubai has exploded, in seemingly every architectural direction possible. They already built the world’s largest artificial island, in the shape of the palm tree. The estimate that they are using one of every three of the world’s cranes, however, seems to be a slight exaggeration: it’s maybe only one out of five.

No one can predict who would actually live there. If current trends continue, Waterfront City’s future residents will probably turn out to be some of the richest people on the planet. Ever.

They are wooden robots. They are, obviously, from Japan.

They are called ‘Karakuri Ningyo:’ ‘karakuri,’ to mean a mechanical object which takes a person by surprise, and ‘ningyo,’ to mean a puppet, doll, or even effigy. Their mechanisms are a brilliant interplay of gears, sand, and even mercury – a combination that allowed some of the world’s first robots, without a single screw.

In 18th century Japan, they could serve tea. Two tea-drinkers would set down a cup of tea on a karakuri’s tray, and the weight of the cup would trigger the doll’s internal clockwork. It would turn around, and deliver the tea straight to the seated guest. Some dolls would also fire tiny, tiny arrows from tiny, tiny bows. They would often score a bullseye.

These puppets, in no small part, underlie Japan’s love of robots. They help to explain why some Japanese treat even the machines in an auto shop with tenderness, sometimes giving them names. It also helps to make sense of Astroboy.

The Serpent Mother is apocalyptic, and beautiful.

Her metal skeleton stretches 168′ long, and she breathes fire. Her entire being is shot through with propane, which erupts into flame at forty-one distinct spots along her spine. The flames are controlled by audience participants. So is the hydraulic head, and jaws.

It was first seen at Burning Man. This is not at all surprising, for an art-fueled festival of bohemian debauchery held annually in the middle of the desert. A shared love of fire, too, made it a match made in heaven. But the Serpent Mother has bigger plans: a world tour.

The Flaming Lotus Girls – the creators of the Serpent Mother – are raising funds. One of their methods is to sell calendars, displaying both the men and women metalworkers posing sexily, while wielding arc welders and sledgehammers.