{"id":269992,"date":"2024-12-10T09:47:53","date_gmt":"2024-12-10T14:47:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/?p=269992"},"modified":"2024-12-10T09:48:00","modified_gmt":"2024-12-10T14:48:00","slug":"a-body-in-a-basement-and-a-50-year-old-mystery","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/2024\/12\/10\/a-body-in-a-basement-and-a-50-year-old-mystery\/","title":{"rendered":"A body in a basement and a 50-year-old mystery"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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From Rolling Stone<\/a>: “A bone case: That\u2019s what law enforcement calls cases where the remains are skeletal, years interred, evidence eroded or disappeared altogether with the passage of time. The remains of the girl soon nicknamed Midtown Jane Doe certainly qualified. The building where she was found, 301 W. 46th St., had few tenants left in February 2003, stubbornly clinging to apartments that had housed sex workers, drug addicts, and others just trying to get by. On Feb. 10, 2003, construction workers noticed a raised concrete slab behind an aging coal furnace in the basement. Six feet wide, five feet long, and a foot high. It seemed out of place. One of the workers took out a sledgehammer and smashed it. A skull rolled out.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The world’s oldest wild bird has laid an egg at the ripe old age of 74<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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From Associated Press<\/a>: “The oldest known wild bird in the world has laid an egg at the ripe age of about 74, her first in four years, U.S. wildlife officials said. The long-winged seabird named Wisdom, a Laysan albatross, returned to Midway Atoll National Wildlife Refuge at the northwestern edge of the Hawaiian Archipelago and laid what experts estimate may be her 60th egg, the Pacific Region of the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service said in a Facebook post. Wisdom and her mate, Akeakamai, had returned to the atoll in the Pacific Ocean to lay and hatch eggs since 2006. Laysan albatrosses mate for life and lay one egg per year. But Wisdom began interacting with another male when she returned last week, officials said.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Note<\/strong>: This is a version of my When The Going Gets Weird newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can\u00a0see other issues\u00a0and sign up here<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

This hotel room is free but you might not want to stay in it<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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From Now I Know<\/a>: “The Spanish island of Ibiza sits in the Mediterranean Sea, about 150 km off the eastern coast of the mainland. It\u2019s a great vacation spot, as you\u2019d imagine, and like any other Mediterranean island one, it can be pricey. But if you want to get there on a budget, there\u2019s a neat option for you: a free hotel room at an upscale hotel right on the water. But yes, there\u2019s a catch or three. First, you can only book it for one night. Second, there\u2019s a ton of demand, so it\u2019s not very easy to book. And third, you won\u2019t get a lot of privacy \u2014 by design. It has glass walls. And everyone passing by can see, well, everything. It’s called the \u201cZero Suite\u201d and it can be found at the Paradiso Ibiza Art Hotel.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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 <\/em>through my Patreon<\/em><\/a> 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. And I appreciate it, believe me!<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

An ancient Mexican version of field hockey uses a ball that is on fire<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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From Wikipedia<\/a>: “Pelota pur\u00e9pecha (Spanish for “Pur\u00e9pecha ball”), called U\u00e1rukua Ch’anakua<\/em> ( “a game with sticks”) in the Pur\u00e9pecha language, is an Indigenous Mexican sport similar to those in the hockey family. A common variant, distinguished as pas\u00e1rutakua<\/em> in Pur\u00e9pecha, uses a ball which has been set on fire and can be played at night. It has a league, several practicing communities and about 800 players across Mexico as of 2010. It is one of 150 pre-Hispanic Mexican games at risk of dying out along with Ulama. The game, which originated in Michoac\u00e1n, is believed to have been developed up to 3500 years ago and something very similar to pelota pur\u00e9pecha is depicted on the murals of the Palacio de Tepantitla at Teotihuacan.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This village has been under a Vatican curse since the 1500s<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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From the BBC<\/a>: “During the 13th Century, the castle occupants dedicated their time to forging fake coins. And to keep the people of Trasmoz from investigating all that scraping and hammering, they spread a rumour that witches and sorcerers were forging cauldrons to boil magic potions at night. It worked, and Trasmoz was forever associated with witchcraft. It was also lay territory, which meant it didn\u2019t belong to the surrounding Catholic dominion of the Church, and by royal decree didn\u2019t have to pay dues or taxes to the nearby monastery \u2013 a fact that angered the Church. So the abbot of Veruela seized his opportunity to punish the population, requesting that the archbishop of Tarazona, the biggest nearby town, excommunicate the entire village.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The neighbours called police about kids sledding on the road<\/h2>\n\n\n
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Acknowledgements<\/strong>: I find a lot of these links myself, but I also get some from other newsletters that I rely on as “serendipity engines,” such as\u00a0<\/em><\/em>The Morning News<\/em><\/a>\u00a0from Rosecrans Baldwin and Andrew Womack, Jodi Ettenberg’s\u00a0<\/em><\/em>Curious About Everything<\/em><\/a>, Dan Lewis’s\u00a0<\/em><\/em>Now I Know<\/em><\/a>, Robert Cottrell and Caroline Crampton’s\u00a0<\/em><\/em>The Browser<\/em><\/a>, Clive Thompson’s\u00a0<\/em><\/em>Linkfest<\/em><\/a>, Noah Brier and Colin Nagy’s\u00a0<\/em><\/em>Why Is This Interesting<\/em><\/a>, Maria Popova’s\u00a0<\/em><\/em>The Marginalian<\/em><\/a>, Sheehan Quirke AKA\u00a0<\/em><\/em>The Cultural Tutor<\/em><\/a>, the\u00a0<\/em><\/em>Smithsonian<\/em><\/a>\u00a0magazine, and\u00a0<\/em><\/em>JSTOR Daily<\/em><\/a>.\u00a0If you come across something interesting that you think should be included here, please feel free to\u00a0email me at mathew @ mathewingram dot com<\/em><\/em><\/p>\n

<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

From Rolling Stone: “A bone case: That\u2019s what law enforcement calls cases where the remains are skeletal, years interred, evidence eroded or disappeared altogether with the passage of time. The remains of the girl soon nicknamed Midtown Jane Doe certainly qualified. The building where she was found, 301 W. 46th St., had few tenants left … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “A body in a basement and a 50-year-old mystery”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_crsspst_to_mathewingramblogwordpresscom":true,"mf2_syndication":[],"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-269992","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-newsletters"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/269992","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=269992"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/269992\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":269995,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/269992\/revisions\/269995"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=269992"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=269992"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=269992"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}