It was late afternoon on September 10, 2017, and Bruce Leshan was at home repairing a crack in his car’s windshield in Bethesda when he heard a scream. “Get out!” the voice cried. Leshan looked up and noticed smoke coming from the house up the hill. As he rounded the corner, racing up Danbury Road, the home came into view: a modest white Cape Cod, its eaves exhaling brown volcanic plumes. Leshan went to the front door and tried to push it open, but it wouldn’t budge — something was obviously blocking it from within. Word began to spread that someone had died and then a county fire investigator made a startling discovery. Squeezing past the furnace amid a tower of junk in the basement, something caught his eye: There was a hole in the concrete floor. Below it, investigators soon learned, stretched an extensive network of tunnels and bunkers — long, twisting hallways of bare rock that would end up revealing the bizarrest of internet-era fables, and one with a ghastly ending. (via The Washingtonian)
Japan tried to get people to eat lettuce by putting an actor’s face on the package
Heads of lettuce packaged in transparent plastic film with the face of Tatsuya Fujiwara printed on it have been flying off the shelves of Tokyo supermarkets lately, as well as going viral on social media. Lettuce is a staple of Japanese cuisine, but data shows that more than 60% of Japanese throw away the humble vegetable in the summer, when it is at peak supply but whiters faster due to hot weather. In an attempt to combat food waste, Japanese food giant Ajinomoto teamed up with a produce cooperative and asked actor Tatsuya Fujiwara to lend them his face. “I was asked, ‘The lettuce is in crisis, so could you lend us your face?’ I said, ‘Sure,’ and it turned out to be a job where I literally lend my face. Why, though… I will be waiting for you at the vegetable section,” Fujiwara announced on X. The marketing effect was instant, and lettuce that would have probably been thrown away started flying off the shelves. A limited supply of 10,000 heads of lettuce wrapped in Tatsuya Fujiwara’s face went on sale this month. (via Oddity Central)
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A drill slipped and this lake swallowed a drilling platform, 11 barges, a tugboat and 65 acres
On November 20, 1980, an oil rig contracted by Texaco was drilling on Jefferson Island, when the drilling assembly pierced an inactive third level of the Diamond Crystal Salt Company salt mine. The drill hole produced a vortex that drained the lake into the mine, filling the enormous caverns that had been created through the removal of salt. The resultant sinkhole swallowed the drilling platform, 11 barges holding supplies for the drilling operation, a tugboat, many trees, and 65 acres (26 hectares) of the surrounding terrain, including much of Jefferson Island. So much water drained into the caverns that the flow of the Delcambre Canal that usually empties the lake into Vermilion Bay was reversed, causing salt water from the Gulf of Mexico to flow into what was now an empty lakebed. This backflow created for a few days the tallest waterfall in Louisiana, at 164 ft (50 m), as the lake refilled with salty water from the Delcambre Canal and Vermilion Bay. Air displaced by water flowing into the mine caverns erupted through the mineshafts as compressed air and then later as 400-foot (120 m) geysers. (via Wikipedia)
Hi everyone! Mathew Ingram here. I am able to continue writing this newsletter in part because of your financial help and support, which you can do either through my Patreon or by upgrading your subscription to a monthly contribution. I enjoy gathering all of these links and sharing them with you, but it does take time, and your support makes it possible for me to do that. I also write a weekly newsletter of technology analysis called The Torment Nexus.
The man who invented modern frozen food got the idea from Inuit fishermen
In 1912, a 25-year-old Brooklyn native with an adventurous streak journeys to the icy reaches of northeast Canada, where he spends the better part of five years learning Indigenous ways. One particular practice fascinates him: Inuit fishermen’s method for preserving fish, which involves simply pulling a trout out of a hole in the ice and letting it freeze almost instantly in the minus-30-degree air. When thawed and cooked, the fish tastes remarkably fresh. The young man has just learned the trick to freezing food in a palatable way, which will bring him a fortune in the decades to come. His name is Clarence Birdseye. The key to maintaining freshness, Birdseye realized, was crystallization. When a food freezes slowly, the liquid within it forms large ice crystals, which damage its cell structure. The result when thawed: a leaky, grainy, mushy product, the only kind of frozen food available in the early 1900s. Flash-freezing, however, results in tiny ice crystals, preserving the food’s texture and flavor. (via The Smithsonian)
This Newfoundland town smells bad thanks to 300,000 gallons of rancid fish sauce
The Newfoundland and Labrador government has issued a new tender to remove stinky, rotten fish sauce from a dilapidated St. Mary’s plant — which the town’s Mayor Steve Ryan hopes can end a decades-long saga. “We’re hoping by the middle of June that we’re going to actually have a company in on the facility starting to clean up. And we’re after having a lot of companies interested, which is a good sign,” Ryan told Radio-Canada. The clean-up is being financed by the province, and is over 20 years in the making. The Atlantic Seafood Sauce Company factory opened in 1990, and was abandoned about a decade later after legal and regulatory battles. Ryan said there are over a hundred 3,000-gallon tanks of long-fermented fish sauce inside the building, and estimated there is between one and two feet of waste on the factory floor. “It’s a warzone. That’s the best way to explain it,” Ryan said. “You have tanks on their sides, tanks with holes in them. It’s like a bomb dropped in the middle of the building.” (via the CBC)
This dog-like robot with wheels can run down a hillside and stand on two legs
Acknowledgements: I find a lot of these links myself, but I also get some from other places that I rely on as “serendipity engines,” such as The Morning News from Rosecrans Baldwin and Andrew Womack, Jodi Ettenberg’s Curious About Everything, Dan Lewis’s Now I Know, Robert Cottrell and Caroline Crampton’s The Browser, Clive Thompson’s Linkfest and Why Is This Interesting by Noah Brier and Colin Nagy. If you come across something you think should be included here, feel free to email me at mathew @ mathewingram dot com