Month: November 2016

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Erik Sass is covering the events of the war exactly 100 years after they happened. This is the 257th installment in the series.   

November 15, 1916: British Advance Into Sinai 

Fighting in the Sinai Peninsula in 1914-1916 was unusual by the standards of the First World War, in large part because – unlike the nose-to-nose stalemate on the Western Front – the two opposing sides were separated by a “no man’s land” consisting of an inhospitable desert stretching hundreds of miles. Although both sides staged raids and larger attacks in this huge arena with scant success, in between these encounters ordinary troops might not see the enemy for months at a time.

This situation finally began to change – albeit very slowly– on November 15, 1916, when the British Egyptian Expeditionary Force under commander-in-chief Archibald Murray made its first foray into the desert with an eye to permanent occupation, rather than reconnaissance or harassing raids. Above all, the long delay in the British offensive reflected the enormous logistical difficulties attending modern desert warfare. 

The first and most challenging obstacle was also the simplest: water. With the British planning to bring a force numbering hundreds of thousands of men across the desert, the small brackish wells scattered across the Sinai Peninsula for use by Bedouin tribes were obviously going to be totally inadequate. The British decided to overcome the obstacle by building a pipeline to carry water from a base near the Suez Canal, at Qantara, across the northern Mediterranean coast of the peninsula to Palestine. 

The pipeline, and an accompanying railroad (top), were the main target of the failed Turkish campaign against the British in front of the Suez Canal at Romani in August 1916. That fall the pipeline and railroad continued to advance east, while the British received additional valuable information from Jewish Zionists who knew the terrain in Palestine, including the location of wells for when the invaders were forced to leave their pipeline behind.

In mid-November the British began their gradual pursuit of the Turkish force they’d first defeated at Romani, which had now retreated to a position at Bir Lahfan, leading to another British victory at El Arish in late December 1916 and Rafah in January 1917. But here, as in Mesopotamia, anyone expecting a colonial walkover was in for a surprise: following these early successes, Turkish resistance mounted once the British arrived in Palestine, stiffened by German officers and the prospect of a threat to the empire’s core territories. 

For ordinary British soldiers, the slow advance across the Sinai alternated with long periods of tedium, broken up by occasional leave to Cairo or Alexandria as well as a grudging appreciation of the desert’s natural beauty. Oskar Teichman, a junior medical officer serving with the British Army in Egypt, recalled the dramatic natural setting near the Suez Canal in early November: 

The landscape was grand and austere; the enormous vista of endless desert, here and there interrupted by gigantic sand mountains – fashioned into fantastic shapes according to the caprices of the wind – and by occasional palm-studded Hods nestling in tiny valleys, was most impressive. In this clear atmosphere the visibility was wonderful. Perfect silence reigned, and there appeared to be no sign of life except an occasional vulture hovering over the old Turkish battle-field or a jackal slinking homewards to his laid. At sunset the sky assumed most marvellous colours, which it is useless to try to describe. Then followed the deathly stillness of the desert night…

On the other side, conditions were already dire for Ottoman citizens living in Palestine, thanks to growing shortages of food, fuel, medicine, and other necessities. These were further underlined by disparities in the rations provided to German soldiers and officers, versus ordinary Turkish soldiers and civilians, according to the Conde de Ballobar, a Spanish diplomat who found himself acting as caretaker for Allied interests in Ottoman Palestine. On November 17, 1916 he wrote in his diary: 

Truly the contrast is notable in this Austrian-German-Turkish entente. The Teutons and Austrians live the life of princes: Sanatoriums, hospitals magnificently equipped, automobiles, economical restaurants, great free warehouses, very well stocked, while the Turks do not even have shoes, eat almost nothing and are lodged and cared for any old way. 

Lawrence Meets Faisal 

Hundreds of miles to the southeast developments marked the beginning of the end of Ottoman rule in the Hejaz, the west central coast of the Arabian Peninsula, home to the two holy cities of Islam, Mecca and Medina, as well as the port of Jiddah. Here, in late October 1916 the British intelligence officer T.E. Lawrence finally met Prince Faisal, the son of Sharif Hussein bin Ali, the feudal ruler of Mecca who rose up against the Turks in June of that year.

Hussein had declared himself “King of the Arab Countries,” but as Lawrence already understood he would mostly be a figurehead for the Arab Revolt, which still needed a dynamic political and diplomatic leader. On meeting Hussein’s third son at a walled compound at Wadi Safra, nestled in a valley full of palm groves, Lawrence decided he had found a true revolutionary statesman.

Lawrence later recalled their first meeting, introduced by one of Faisal’s many retainers, in typically dramatic (not to say mystical) fashion: 

He led me through a second gate into an inner court, and across it I saw standing framed between the posts of a black doorway, a white figure waiting tensely for me. This was Feisal, and I felt at the glance that now I had found the man whom I had come to Arabia to seek, the leader alone needed to make the Arab Revolt win through to success. He looked very tall and pillar-like, very slender, dressed in long white robes and a brown head cloth with a brilliant scarlet and gold cord… His hands were loosely crossed in front of him on his dagger. 

Faisal would eventually prove a great leader, as Lawrence guessed – but for now the Arab Revolt was in its infancy, and the Turks felt they had little to fear from a disorganized band of Bedouin outlaws. Lawrence would have to do something to get their attention. 

See the previous installment or all entries.

After 45 years overseeing his entertainment empire from the comfortable confines of the opulent Playboy Mansion, Hugh Hefner has become a tenant. Last August, the 90-year-old founder of Playboy magazine sold the property via his Playboy Enterprises to private equity investor Daren Metropoulos for $100 million, with the caveat that Hefner can lease it for $1 million a month.

Metropoulos—whose firm owns the Hostess snack company—is buying more than just a 29-room luxury residence. Throughout the decades, the Mansion has been seen as the ultimate destination for decadence and sexualized socializing. Check out 15 facts about its history, the secret tunnels built for celebrities, and why Mike Tyson won’t be attending movie night anytime soon.

1. IT WASN’T THE FIRST PLAYBOY COMPOUND.

When Hugh Hefner produced the first issue of Playboy in 1953, he toiled from a kitchen table in a small Chicago apartment. By 1959, the magazine had become so successful that he was able to take over a Chicago mansion, outfitting it with an indoor basement pool and a bedroom-slash-office with a 100-inch diameter bed; Playboy models and nightclub employees could rent rooms on the third and fourth floors for $50 a month. (No male visitors were allowed.)

After buying the real estate where he built the Los Angeles mansion for $1 million in 1971, Hefner shuttled between both before making a permanent move to the West Coast in 1974. After stints as an art school and student dorm, the Chicago building was converted to a seven-unit condominium in 1993.

2. CELEBRITIES USED SECRET TUNNELS FOR VISITS.

The 1970s saw a number of celebrities use the Mansion for decathlons of decadence, but not everyone wanted to be seen coming and going. According to Playboy.com, Polaroids and blueprints were discovered in 2015 detailing an underground network of tunnels running from the property to the homes of famous guests like Warren Beatty, Jack Nicholson, and James Caan. It’s believed the tunnels were closed in 1989, the year of Hefner’s marriage to Playmate Kimberley Conrad.

3. JOHN LENNON ONCE ASSAULTED A PAINTING THERE.

The Mansion doubles as an impressive art gallery for art aficionado Hefner, but one former Beatle wasn’t too appreciative. During a visit to the Mansion in the 1970s, John Lennon allegedly became a little belligerent and extinguished his cigarette into a work by Henri Matisse. Hefner restored the illustration; Lennon was presumably allowed to continue visiting.

4. IT HAS ITS OWN PET CEMETERY.

With both its own zoo license and dozens of pets roaming the Mansion over the years, Hefner thought it would make sense to keep a resting place for animals on the grounds. Many of Hefner’s personal canines have been buried there; so have many of the Mansion’s several monkeys and 50-plus varieties of birds. One tombstone reads, “Teri, Beloved Woolly Monkey.”

5. THE PLACE IS BOOBY-TRAPPED.

In his autobiography, The Unusual Suspect, actor Stephen Baldwin recalled the time that he and Robert Downey, Jr. descended a spiral staircase to hang out with Playmates and possibly indulge in semi-legal substances in the wine cellar. When Downey reached the third-to-last step, he turned to Baldwin and told him not to step on it because it would trigger a silent alarm. The feature might have been a holdover from 1927, when the cellar was in use as a boozy storage room during Prohibition.

6. LUKE WILSON WAS BANNED FROM THE PREMISES.

Actor Luke Wilson admitted to press in 2006 that some modest misdirection while talking to Mansion staff got him “DNAed”—tagged with a Do Not Admit label. Wilson said a Mansion employee asked who he was with one night and Wilson lied by saying it was his brother, Owen: It was actually a friend. Wilson was denied entry for 18 months before he groveled and was allowed back in.

7. SOMETIMES GUESTS WOULD JUST MOVE IN.

The amenities of the Mansion were such that several of Hefner’s guests over the years considered it a staycation. James Caan moved in for a bit in the 1970s; so did Shel Silverstein and Tony Curtis.

8. IT’S HOSTED BOXING EVENTS.

Hefner has opened up the Mansion several times to host professional boxing and mixed martial arts events. Boxers like David Haye, who were accustomed to fighting in front of large Las Vegas crowds, found it slightly disarming to compete in front of just a few hundred spectators, many of them celebrities; Hefner thumbed his nose at women competing, telling The Guardian in 2003 that he had “mixed” emotions about females fighting.

9. HEFNER HAS AN IN-HOUSE BIOGRAPHER.

Chronicling the many seminal moments in Hefner’s life is the duty of Steve Martinez, a full-time archivist who painstakingly updates and maintains the nearly 3000 volumes of scrapbooks kept in the Mansion’s library. Martinez collects photos and information during the week; on weekends, he and Hefner update the books. The volumes begin with portraits of Hefner at six months; the subject has left instructions that the final volumes be filled with his obituaries.

10. THE GROTTO ONCE MADE PEOPLE REALLY SICK.

Hefner has had to endure many jokes over the years about the alleged petri dish that is the grotto, the Mansion’s man-made cave that includes a whirlpool. In April 2011, it stopped being funny: 123 people who visited the attraction over a weekend for a fundraiser became ill, with health officials identifying the bacteria that causes Legionnaires’ disease in the water. Symptoms included fever, headache, cough, and other flu-like ailments.

11. IT EMPLOYS OVER 80 STAFF MEMBERS.

With 21,000 square feet to attend to, there’s no skeleton crew: Playboy employs over 80 full-time workers to tend to the grounds, cook, provide security, and maintain electrical and plumbing services.

12. MIKE TYSON BROKE MANSION RULES.

Hefner takes the Mansion’s regularly-scheduled movie nights very seriously. A lifetime film buff, he has a board of friends curate titles for screenings and has a zero-tolerance policy when it comes to disruptions during their running times. Once, Mike Tyson was invited to attend a film. After sinking into a leather couch, he fell asleep, ignoring his phone that kept ringing incessantly. It was Tyson’s first and last invitation to the movies.

13. GUESTS ARE GREETED BY FRANKENSTEIN’S MONSTER.

Visitors bearing an invitation to the Mansion are brought through iron gates to the entrance, where they announce their presence to a giant rock housing an intercom system. Once inside, guests idle for a bit in the Great Room, a foyer containing several portraits of Hefner and a giant statue of Frankenstein’s monster.

14. HEFNER HAS A CARDBOARD STAND-IN.

When a dinner gathering or party is in full swing and Hefner can’t attend, a life-size cardboard cut-out of him can usually be seen looming over the proceedings.

15. LARRY FLYNT ALMOST BOUGHT IT.

Free speech advocate/Hustler founder Larry Flynt expressed interest in buying the Mansion early in 2016, with plans to convert it into the “Hustler Mansion.” While it’s not known whether a formal offer was ever made, Flynt conveyed through associate Harry Mohney that Hefner would not be welcome to remain. As it stands, Hefner’s deal includes being able to remain in residence until his death.

All images courtesy of Getty Images.

Families often use the holidays as an excuse to indulge in repeat viewings of Planes, Trains and Automobiles and Elf. But for a certain section of the population, the yuletide is all about horror. Although it didn’t truly emerge until the mid-1970s, “holiday horror” is a thriving subgenre that often combines comedy to tell stories of demented Saint Nicks and lethal gingerbread men. If you’ve never seen Santa slash someone, here are 15 movies to get you started.

1. THANKSKILLING (2009)

Most holiday horror movies concern Christmas, so ThanksKilling is a bit of an anomaly. Another reason it’s an anomaly? It opens in 1621, with an axe-wielding turkey murdering a topless pilgrim woman. The movie continues on to the present-day, where a group of college friends are terrorized by that same demon bird during Thanksgiving break. It’s pretty schlocky, but if Turkey Day-themed terror is your bag, make sure to check out the sequel: ThanksKilling 3. (No one really knows what happened to ThanksKilling 2.)

2. BLACK CHRISTMAS (1974)

Fittingly, the same man who brought us A Christmas Story also brought us its twisted cousin. Before Bob Clark co-wrote and directed the 1983 saga of Ralphie Parker, he helmed Black Christmas. It concerns a group of sorority sisters who are systematically picked off by a man who keeps making threatening phone calls to their house. Oh, and it all happens during the holidays. Black Christmas is often considered the godfather of holiday horror, but it was also pretty early on the slasher scene, too. It opened the same year as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and beat Halloween by a full four years.

3. SILENT NIGHT, DEADLY NIGHT (1984)

This movie isn’t about Santa Claus himself going berserk and slaughtering a bunch of people. But it is about a troubled teen who does just that in a Santa suit. Billy Chapman starts Silent Night, Deadly Night as a happy little kid, only to witness a man dressed as St. Nick murder his parents in cold blood. Years later, after he has grown up and gotten a job at a toy store, he conducts a killing spree in his own red-and-white suit. The PTA and plenty of critics condemned the film for demonizing a kiddie icon, but it turned into a bona fide franchise with four sequels and a 2012 remake.

4. RARE EXPORTS: A CHRISTMAS TALE (2010)

This Finnish flick dismantles Santa lore in truly bizarre fashion, and it’s not easy to explain in a quick plot summary. But Rare Exports involves a small community living at the base of Korvatunturi mountain, a major excavation project, a bunch of dead reindeer, and a creepy old naked dude who may or may not be Santa Claus. Thanks to its snowy backdrop, the movie scored some comparisons to The Thing, but the hero here isn’t some Kurt Russell clone with equally feathered hair. It’s a bunch of earnest kids and their skeptical dads, who all want to survive the holidays in one piece.

5. TO ALL A GOODNIGHT (1980)

To All a Goodnight follows a by-now familiar recipe: Add a bunch of young women to one psycho dressed as Santa Claus and you get a healthy dose of murder and this 1980 slasher flick. Only this one takes place at a finishing school. So it’s fancier.

6. KRAMPUS (2015)

Although many Americans are blissfully unaware of him, Krampus has terrorized German-speaking kids for centuries. According to folklore, he’s a yuletide demon who punishes naughty children. (He’s also part-goat.) That’s some solid horror movie material, so naturally Krampus earned his own feature film last year. In the movie, he’s summoned because a large suburban family loses its Christmas cheer. That family has an Austrian grandma who had encounters with Krampus as a kid, so he returns to punish her descendants. He also animates one truly awful Jack-in-the-Box.

7. THE GINGERDEAD MAN (2005)

“Eat me, you punk b*tch!” That’s one of the many corny catchphrases spouted by the Gingerdead Man, an evil cookie possessed by the spirit of a convicted killer (played by Gary Busey). The lesson here, obviously, is to never bake.

8. JACK FROST (1997)

No, this isn’t the Michael Keaton snowman movie. It’s actually a holiday horror movie that beat that family film by a year. In this version, Jack Frost is a serial killer on death row who escapes prison and then, through a freak accident, becomes a snowman. He embarks on a murder spree that’s often played for laughs—for instance, the cops threaten him with hairdryers. But the comedy is pretty questionable in the infamous, and quite controversial, Shannon Elizabeth shower scene.

9. ELVES (1989)

Based on the tagline—“They’re not working for Santa anymore”—you’d assume this is your standard evil elves movie. But Elves weaves Nazis, bathtub electrocutions, and a solitary, super grotesque elf into its utterly absurd plot. Watch at your own risk.

10. SINT (2010)

The Dutch have their own take on Santa, and his name is Sinterklaas. Sinterklaas travels to the Netherlands via steamship each year with his racist sidekick Zwarte Piet. But otherwise, he’s pretty similar to Santa. And if Santa can be evil, so can Sinterklaas. According to the backstory in Sint (or Saint), the townspeople burned their malevolent bishop alive on December 5, 1492. But Sinterklaas returns from the grave on that date whenever there’s a full moon to continue dropping bodies. In keeping with his olden origins, he rides around on a white horse wielding a golden staff … that he can use to murder you.

11. SANTA’S SLAY (2005)

Ever wonder where Santa came from? This horror-comedy claims he comes from the worst possible person: Satan. The devil’s kid lost a bet many years ago and had to pretend to be a jolly gift-giver. But now the terms of the bet are up and he’s out to act like a true demon. That includes killing Fran Drescher and James Caan, obviously.

12. ALL THROUGH THE HOUSE (2015)

Another Santa slasher is on the loose in All Through the House, but the big mystery here is who it is. This villain dons a mask during his/her streak through suburbia—and, as the genre dictates, offs a bunch of promiscuous young couples along the way. The riddle is all tied up in the disappearance of a little girl, who vanished several years earlier.

13. CHRISTMAS EVIL (1980)

Several years before Silent Night, Deadly Night garnered protests for its anti-Kringle stance, Christmas Evil put a radicalized Santa at the center of its story. The movie’s protagonist, Harry Stadling, first starts to get weird thoughts in his head as a kid when he sees “Santa” (really his dad in the costume) groping his mom. Then, he becomes unhealthily obsessed with the holiday season, deludes himself into thinking he’s Santa, and goes on a rampage. The movie is mostly notable for its superfan John Waters, who lent commentary to the DVD and gave Christmas Evil some serious cult cred.

14. SANTA CLAWS (1996)

If you thought this was the holiday version of Pet Sematary, guess again. The culprit here isn’t a demon cat in a Santa hat, but a creepy next-door neighbor. Santa Claws stars B-movie icon Debbie Rochon as Raven Quinn, an actress going through a divorce right in the middle of the holidays. She needs some help caring for her two girls, so she seeks out Wayne, her neighbor who has an obsessive crush on her. He eventually snaps and dresses up as Santa Claus in a ski mask. Mayhem ensues.

15. NEW YEAR’S EVIL (1980)

Because the holidays aren’t over until everyone’s sung “Auld Lang Syne,” we can’t count out New Year’s Eve horror. In New Year’s Evil, lady rocker Blaze is hosting a live NYE show. Everything is going well, until a man calls in promising to kill at midnight. The cops write it off as a prank call, but soon, Blaze’s friends start dropping like flies. Just to tie it all together, the mysterious murderer refers to himself as … “EVIL.”

If you only pay attention to figure skating once every four years, you’re missing out on one of the most passionately-practiced sporting events in the world. To get you up to speed, we’ve gathered some fast facts about this perfect pairing of art and athleticism. 

1. IT’S THE OLDEST WINTER GAME. 

Figure skating debuted during the London Olympic Games in 1908, pre-dating the beginning of the formal winter games by 16 years.  

2. SKATES USED TO BE MADE OF ANIMAL BONES. 

Before people began to develop artistic expression through skates, they used them as a practical form of transportation. Thousands of years ago, residents in Finland strapped animal bones to their feet to glide across frozen lakes rather than walk around them. Scientists believe they might have also used wooden poles to propel themselves forward. Metal blades didn’t arrive until the 13^th century. 

3. A CLEVER INVENTION MADE FIGURE SKATING POSSIBLE. 

Prior to E.V. Bushnell inventing a secure clip for metal skates, it wasn’t possible to perform intricate maneuvers on blades—they’d simply fall off, or injure the wearer. But when Bushnell unveiled skates that could be clipped to the foot in 1848, more elaborate moves became possible. 

4. ICE DANCING GREW OUT OF THE WALTZ. 

Modern figure skating can involve “ice dancing,” an activity dating back to a harsh London winter in 1862. But the first concrete example may have come in the 1880s, when the Vienna Skating Club began to mimic the Waltz on ice during their gatherings. Ice dancing wasn’t recognized in the Winter Games until 1976.

5. THE FIRST WORLD CHAMPIONSHIPS WERE GENDER-MIXED. 

Skating competitions haven’t always been broken up by gender. During a St. Petersburg, Russia event in 1896, there was one division and only men were allowed to compete. When the world championships were held in London in 1902, a woman named Madge Syers entered and took second behind male winner Ulrich Salchow. A separate division for women was instituted three years later. 

6. A PLANE CRASH WIPED OUT THE ENTIRE U.S. TEAM. 

The best American skaters were en route to a competition in Prague in 1961 when their plane crashed, killing everyone on board. Out of respect for those who were lost, the competition was canceled. It would be several years before the U.S. could rebound from the tragedy and once again become a presence on the international scene. 

7. THE BLADE IS SERRATED IN FRONT. 

Figure skaters can pivot and stop short thanks to a barely-visible serrated edge on the tip of their blades. Also known as a “toe pick,” it grabs the ice and helps skaters prepare for jumps. 

8. YOU DON’T WANT TO BE ANYWHERE NEAR THEM DURING A LANDING.

Male skaters weighing 150 pounds or more can land on the ice following a jump with extraordinary force: more than 1000 lbs. of pressure. 

9. THERE ARE MOVES MALE SKATERS CAN’T DO.

The “layback spin” that requires skaters to lean back with their shoulders and head puts considerable pressure on the spinal column and demands a great deal of flexibility. It’s thought that female skaters typically have more success doing the maneuver than men. 

10. THEY SPIN AT 300RPM.

Have you wondered how skaters can endure the seemingly-impossible speed reached when they execute a spinning jump? So do we: At more than 300 revolutions per minute (RPM), figure skaters experience as much RPM as astronauts in centrifuge training. 

11. VOCALS ARE BANNED DURING ROUTINES.

You may not have noticed, but at many top level competitions, skaters who take to the ice with musical accompaniment have to abide by a strict rule: None of the music can include vocals.

12. THE WRONG COSTUME CAN COST THEM POINTS. 

In many skating competitions, judges can deduct a point if they consider a skater’s costume to be overly garish or provocative. While that sounds dangerously subjective, the point is deducted only if multiple judges agree that the outfit is in poor taste.

13. THEY CAN’T USE PROPS. 

Skaters performing routines are expected to succeed or fail based on their individuality and skill-set: They can’t use props. The only time you’ll see a figure skater accessorizing is during exhibitions, like the one held during 1972 when a silver medalist appeared with a plastic umbrella.

14. THEY USE CRASH PADS. 

Inexperienced figure skaters are best served adding padding to their bodies to cushion against hard falls on the ice. While helmets are not uncommon, particularly for younger skaters, many also wear crash pads that are essentially cushioning for the buttocks in the event of a rear landing. 

15. THE U.S. MEDALS EVERY TIME. 

Despite stiff competition from perennial rival Russia, the United States has been well-represented in figure skating competition during the Winter Games. The country has won at least one medal during every event dating back to 1948—that’s 18 consecutive competitions.

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In 1990, the Voyager I spacecraft took a mosaic of images known as the “family portrait”―a view of the solar system from a distance of 6 billion kilometers. In the image, Earth is captured as a single pixel later immortalized by Carl Sagan, who put the affairs of our “pale blue dot,” as he called it, into perspective:

On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there—on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.

The past 26 years have yielded astonishing and wonderful revelations about the cosmos, including proof of the existence of exoplanets―worlds orbiting other stars―with many of them in “habitable zones” around their suns, areas where it’s not too hot and not too cold. These are planets, in other words, that might support life.

For all the artistic renditions, however, and the hypotheses of what such worlds might be like, the totality of our images of those planets exist mostly as waveform graphs, with a scattering of thermal images of gas giants analogous to Jupiter. No rocky world in a habitable zone has ever been imaged directly. Their stars are billions of times brighter than they are, and there is no hardware in space able to “turn off” the light of the star without turning off the habitable-zone planet.

Project Blue intends to change that. It is an effort by a group of scientists, engineers, and space organizations to launch a small telescope into space with the singular goal of directly imaging in visible light (i.e. the light we see with our own eyes) an Earth-like planet around one or more of the stars of Alpha Centauri, and to do so using private funds. Not only might the mission redefine humanity’s place in the universe, but it might also redefine how planetary science missions are funded, launched, and operated.

THE NULL RESULT

Since the 1990s, astronomers have been rigorously engaged in the study of Alpha Centauri, the closest star system to our own, and people have been talking about imaging planets around nearby stars for nearly as long. The Project Blue team, comprised of some of the best minds in the field, came together this summer to work through and settle on the different technical concepts that have long been considered necessary for this sort of mission. A perennial roadblock has been funding—it’s simply been too expensive to mount this sort of mission. That roadblock has finally given way.

Even when it was too expensive to attempt the imaging of a habitable exoplanet in Alpha Centauri, however, it was still a good bet. The Project Blue team has chosen to focus on the binary stars Alpha Centauri A and B. The stars are close to our solar system, relatively speaking, which means a space telescope needs only a half-meter mirror. Because the system contains two stars, there is promising potential for discovery. In fact, the Kepler space observatory already discovered a planet around Alpha Centauri B in 2012, though it could not be described as habitable: Its orbit is just 6 million kilometers from its star. (Just this summer, Kepler spotted a planet orbiting Proxima Centauri, a smaller, dimmer star that is closest to our Sun. It, too, has a tight orbit.) 

As for finding a habitable world, imagine you flip two coins. The possible results are: both coins turning up heads; one turning up heads, the other turning up tails; or both turning up tails. If you’re betting on heads, those are great odds. Consider further that in our own solar system, there are three planets in the habitable zone: Venus, Earth, and Mars. (Obviously, only one of the trio is a habitable blue dot.) Suddenly the likelihood of Project Blue successfully photographing something seems a lot higher.

To capture the image, Project Blue will launch a space telescope the size of a small washing machine, equipped with a coronagraph and deformable mirror. A coronagraph can “turn off” the light of the alien suns. That light is focused by the mirror. Because the twin stars in Alpha Centauri are so much like our own Sun, astronomers know where to look to find their habitable zones, and where planets have to be in those zones to host liquid water. Therein lies the key difference between NASA space telescopes and the one to be launched by Project Blue: NASA has to design its telescopes to service hundreds of targets. Project Blue has only one, and a precise target area within the system. If a NASA telescope fails to find something, it moves on to the next thing. If Project Blue fails to find its target, the mission is over.

NASA has passed over this sort of mission in the past because of this “null result”―the possibility of two tails turning up from our coin toss. Peer review panels normally look for a larger context for scientific impact, and however likely it is that habitable planets orbit one of these stars, what would it mean for exoplanets in general if no such planets exist? Very little. It wouldn’t tell us anything at all about how common or rare Earth-like planets are around other stars in the galaxy.

This isn’t to say there hasn’t been excitement for a mission like this. “Excitement” is an understatement. Directly imaging an Earth-like world is a holy grail of exoplanet study.

KICKSTARTING THEIR WAY TO SPACE (AT FIRST) 

The era of commercial space has arrived, and the logical next step is to bring space science into the fold. Such barriers as spacecraft control and access to space are now surmountable thanks to companies like SpaceX, the private company helmed by Elon Musk that is pioneering reusable rockets, and that presently launches orbital payloads and resupplies the International Space Station (with designs to launch astronauts in 2019 and put humans on Mars in the next decade).

“It’s a great time to be moving on a project like this using private funding,” Jon Morse, the CEO of BoldlyGo and one of the leaders of Project Blue, tells mental_floss. “It leverages what NASA has been investing in exoplanet research, along with pulling together the technologies and capabilities that commercial space has been developing, which has really brought a lot of the cost down.”

Project Blue is taking a three-pronged approach to raising funds for the mission. The first $1 million will be raised on Kickstarter, in a campaign that begins today. This is analogous to the way NASA funds “Phase A” studies, in which a small percentage of a mission’s cost is provided for scientists to develop a preliminary design. A methodical NASA-like approach to mission development is no accident. Before Jon Morse ran BoldlyGo, he was the director of the Astrophysics division of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate.

Crowdfunding this phase of Project Blue has the added benefit of raising the mission’s profile. If nothing else, the public can be invested, literally, in the mission’s success. Afterward, the mission leadership will engage private investors directly to raise another $24 million. Since its announcement last month, the project has been inundated with requests from companies to help provide such things as onboard computing and spacecraft control. “We could not conceive of doing this even a few years ago,” says Morse.

And NASA, while not strictly necessary for mission success, will not be excluded from this endeavor. Project Blue has also approached the agency to establish a Space Act Agreement, in which it will provide modest resources in exchange for a minority role in the mission. NASA has such an agreement with SpaceX. No money is exchanged, but NASA field centers—its facilities around the country—partner with SpaceX to provide expertise and institutional knowledge. For Project Blue, this might mean the use of test facilities, and NASA personnel assigned to the project. This is also analogous to NASA’s participation in certain international missions, where there is no exchange of funds, but in exchange for a small role, NASA provides certain technologies or technical support.

TARGET 2020

The Project Blue team believes it can get the science payload built and integrated into a spacecraft in roughly three years—four on the outside. “We have a pretty good idea of what to do to get the spacecraft built,” says Morse. “Look for it by the end of the decade. It won’t be earlier than late 2019―maybe 2020―to launch. This is a lean-and-mean assessment that’s based on our experience with other payloads that have been developed.”

And its effects on commercial and public-private partnerships for science missions would be tectonic. Capturing an image of a “pale blue dot” around one of the Alpha Centauri stars “would be a really compelling scientific result that we think would rival some of the most momentous discoveries in science and space exploration,” says Morse. It would also enable study beyond an imaged habitable world. Scientists could extract from the light wavelengths evidence of things like elements in the atmosphere, water, and perhaps extrapolate signs of life by way of such processes as photosynthesis on the planet’s surface.

That our own pale blue dot exists is something of a miracle. So much could have gone wrong, and might yet still. So little keeps the light of civilization flickering. We dream of other blue dots, and write stories, poems, and scholarly research to that effect, but to see it? To know with certainty that it’s there, and that it might too hold the dreams of a species? This recasts the question, “Why are we here?” as something parochial—albeit globally so. Suddenly, “we” encompasses so much more, and “here” so much less. And though Carl Sagan said this about our own dot, he might as well have been saying this about another: “The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena … Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light.”

That daily latte habit is bad for more than just your wallet. It’s also pretty terrible for the environment, unless you’re dedicated to bringing your own cup. Starbucks alone sells about 4 billion cups a year, and although the company has been working to make its cups recyclable, many coffee cups can’t be composted or recycled due to plastic linings. In Germany, about 2.8 billion to-go cups go right into the trash annually.

Coffee shops in Hamburg, Germany, are trying to combat the scourge of coffee trash by introducing a reusable cup program across cafes in the city, as CityLab reports. The Refill It! cup, created by the local coffee importer El Rojito, can be acquired at participating retailers for a deposit of just €1.50 (around $1.60). You can keep the cup if you want, refilling it at other coffee shops, or you can return it and get your deposit back at one of the participating cafes. That cafe will then wash out the reusable cup and allow someone else to take it. If you’re super worried about germs, you can purchase your own lid and felt sleeve.

The project started operating within 11 different coffee shops around the city on November 1.

Even if you don’t live in Hamburg, you can still do your part to save landfills from disposable coffee cups. Most cafes will happily make your drink in any reusable mug you bring, and many will give you a small discount for your trouble. If you’re not a fan of the tall thermos-style mug, KeepCup makes neat cups, shaped just like the one you’d get at the coffee shop, in plastic or glass.

[h/t CityLab]

Good news for Studio Ghibli fans: Just days after Hayao Miyazaki announced that he’s coming out of retirement to make one more film, IndieWire reports that the legendary director’s Academy Award-winning animated classic, Spirited Away, will be making its way back into theaters next month.

In celebration of the film’s 15th anniversary, Fathom Events is teaming up with GKIDS for a two-day tribute to Spirited Away in early December that will see both the English-dubbed (featuring the voices of Daveigh Chase, Michael Chiklis, and John Ratzenberger) and the English-subtitled versions of the film be screened. The feature will be accompanied by Ghiblies: Episode 2, a 25-minute comedic look at Studio Ghibli’s staff that was made in 2002 and has never been released in North America.

Spirited Away will return to more than 400 theaters nationwide on Sunday, December 4 and Monday, December 5. Go to Fathom Events for more information, including a complete list of theaters and showtimes.

[h/t IndieWire]

Shakespeare wrote that “all the world’s a stage,” but the performances of his own plays were limited to a handful of venues. Before the construction of the iconic Globe theater in 1599, a couple of his works were put on at the Curtain in the Shoreditch neighborhood of London. All that’s left of the structure today are foundations that have laid buried for centuries. Thanks to recent archaeological findings, experts now have a better sense of what the building looked like and how it may have influenced the writing of plays like Henry V.

As Smithsonian.com reports, the remains of the Curtain were rediscovered in 2011. Since then, archaeologists from the Museum of London Archaeology have made some surprising revelations, notably that the stage was long and rectangular rather than circular like the Globe. The stage directions of Henry V, which debuted at the Curtain in the late 16th century, describe the venue as a “wooden O.” That line had long led scholars to believe that the theater was round. This recent finding, however, suggests that a change was made to the text after Shakespeare moved to the Globe.

The dig also revealed evidence of a tunnel that would have let actors move discreetly from one side of the stage to the other. Heather Knight, a senior archaeologist for the Museum of London Archaeology, told The Guardian:

“The question now is whether Shakespeare and other playwrights were writing plays specifically for this kind of stage—which would have required a completely different style of interaction compared to a thrust stage with the audience on three sides … Did it mean that it needed a different style of acting, for instance, or that you could get more people on the stage, and so you could put in many more characters?”

Questions about how character interactions may have been written to suit the venue, while fun, are highly speculative. But the idea that Shakespeare wrote Henry V with the Curtain in mind isn’t too farfetched—scholars believe he did the same thing for the Globe. The theater’s large standing room section meant that lengthy plays were more likely to encourage the audience to “hiss and pelt the unfortunate actors with oranges,” according to the University of Nottingham [PDF]. This may be why one version (the Q1) of Hamlet is lighter on soliloquies and features no intervals or breaks in the action. The Globe was also open-air, so performances could only last as long as the sun was out.

[h/t Smithsonian]

 
Earlier this month, the head of the University of New Mexico’s Gallup campus was under fire for spending public money on a Bigfoot conference and expedition. Never mind that there are no fossils, no corpses, no DNA samples, nor any other hard evidence to suggest Bigfoot exists. Nearly 50 years after the famous Patterson–Gimlin footage was shot in northern California, people are still looking for hairy hulking apemen (fewer apewomen) hiding from us in the forests.

To the collective annoyance of skeptics, these stories aren’t likely to go away any time soon. Just take a look across the globe and back through history and you’ll find that lots of cultures have tales about shaggy, often smelly cryptids (animals of unproven existence). In their 2013 book Abominable Science, authors Daniel Loxton and Donald R. Prothero acknowledge that Bigfoot myths might enjoy plausibility for a good evolutionary reason: There was a time when “footprints in the mud really did mean that another bipedal primate was lurking about.” Indeed, our human ancestors used to share forests with once-mysterious orangutans, gorillas, and, a very long time ago, the now-extinct primates like Gigantopithecus. Today, Bigfoot, or Sasquatch, dominates the lore of North America. But here are 15 hirsute alternatives that show just how ubiquitous these mythical creatures are.

1. MOGOLLON MONSTER

The screeching, putrid-smelling, campsite-wrecking Mogollon Monster is said to stalk Arizona’s Mogollon Rim. The first record of a sighting might come from a 1903 edition of The Arizona Republican, in which a man named I.W. Stevens claimed he saw a clawed apeman that was covered in gray hair and had a matted beard that reached to his knees. This beast carried a club, drank the blood of cougars and “screamed the wildest, most unearthly screech,” according to Stevens. He himself never claimed it was a monster; instead, he speculated it was someone held hostage and then abandoned by Native Americans. Several decades later, future cryptozoologist Don Davis claimed he had his own encounter with the Mogollon Monster during a 1940s Boy Scout camping trip (he was 13 at the time), noting that the creature had deep-set expressionless eyes, a square head, and a stench so bad Davis thought he had soiled his sleeping bag in terror.

2. AM FEAR LIATH MÒR: THE GREY MAN OF SCOTLAND

Chemist J. Norman Collie believed in science. But still he was spooked by a shadowy presence while hiking alone on Scotland’s second highest peak, Ben MacDui. He told of the experience at the General Meeting of the Cairngorm Club in Aberdeen in 1925: “As I walked on and the eerie crunch, crunch, sounded behind me, I was seized with terror and took to my heels, staggering blindly among the boulders for four or five miles nearly down to Rothiemurchus Forest. Whatever you make of it, I do not know, but there is something very queer about the top of Ben MacDui and I will not go back there again by myself I know.” Collie wasn’t alone. Others have described similar run-ins with the yeti-like Grey Man, or Am Fear Liath Mòr. According to The Scotsman, these encounters seem more spiritual than physical, often accompanied by “uncontrolled terror, deep despair and huge negative energy.”

3. EBU GOGO

Apemen—and apewomen—come in all sizes. On the Indonesian island of Flores, “Ebu Gogo” means “the grandmother who eats anything.” These fabled creatures are said to be diminutive, hairy, and pot-bellied. Some believers have tried to link these cryptids to the hobbit-like human Homo floresiensis, whose bones were also found on Flores. But recent research suggests that species died out 50,000 years ago.

4. ALMAS

In Central Asia, Bigfoot takes the form of the Almas. This legendary apeman of the Altai Mountains is supposedly more humanoid in form than the North American Bigfoot, and some cryptozoologists have tried claiming that Almases might make up a holdout population of Neanderthals. Close encounters have not been limited to sightings of shadowy figures in the woods. In one troublingly racist episode from the 19th century, a woman of African descent named Zana was held captive in Russia by villagers who suspected she was an Almas. Worse, some scientists today are apparently still trying to prove she was not human.

5. YETI

Bigfoot’s best known (and perhaps most-sought) companion might be the Yeti, or “Abominable Snowman,” who roams the Himalayas. The Yeti has its origins in old Sherpa folklore, but it became the hulking shaggy apeman of pop culture after Western mountaineers started exploring Mount Everest in the 20th century and came back with sensational tales. In 1959, the American Embassy in Kathmandu released a memo notifying would-be Yeti hunters that they would have to apply for a permit with the Nepalese government and could photograph but not kill any Yeti they might find.

6. YOWIE

If you can take the witness sketches as accurate representations, the Yowie is sort of like a hairy luchador with a cone-shaped head and the posture of a gorilla. While alleged sightings are still reported in the wilds of Australia, the Yowie has its roots in Aboriginal legends, and European colonizers sometimes referred to the creature as the “Australian ape.” In 1882, a newspaper columnist in Sydney told of a sighting near Bateman’s Bay in New South Wales: “I should think that if it were standing perfectly upright it would be nearly 5ft high. It was tailless and covered with very long black hair, which was of a dirty red or snuff-colour about the throat and breast…On the whole it was a most uncouth and repulsive looking creature, evidently possessed of prodigious strength, and one which I should not care to come to close quarters.”

7. ORANG PENDEK

Malay for “short man,” the Orang Pendek supposedly lives in the jungles of the island Sumatra. This ground-dwelling, pint-sized creature is said to have long arms and broad shoulders. It apparently lacks special powers—though it might throw rocks at you if it feels threatened.

8 AGOGWE

During a lion-hunting expedition in Tanzania in the early 20th century, a man named William Hichens saw “mystery men-beasts” called Agogwe and lived to tell the tale. “They were like little men, about four feet high, walking upright, but clad in russet hair,” Hichens wrote. “The native hunter with me gaped in mingled fear and amazement. They were, he said, agogwe, the little furry men whom one does not see once in a lifetime.” The locals also said that if you put a gourd of beer and a bowl of food out in your garden, the Agogwe would take the food and do some hoeing and weeding at night in return, which was just too much for Hichens to buy. “That, I can well believe, is myth.”

9. KUSHTAKA

Alaskans have a rather demonic version of Bigfoot: kushtakas. In the language of the Tlingit indigenous tribe of the Pacific Northwest, “kushtaka” means “land otter man.” Sure, otters are cute, but kushtakas have the not-so-cute ability to shape-shift, possess people, steal souls, and cause landslides. In The Strangest Story Ever Told, miner Harry D. Colp claimed that one of his companions was beset by a swarm of these sexless, sore-covered, monkey-like creatures during a prospecting trip in southeastern Alaska’s Thomas Bay in 1900. Undaunted by such accounts, actor Charlie Sheen reportedly took a private jet to Alaska to hunt kushtakas in 2013. He did not find any of the elusive creatures.

10. DE LOYS’ APE

 
In the 1920s, Swiss scientist George Alexis Montandon claimed he had evidence of a human-sized ape that lurked in Venezuela. It wasn’t until the late 1990s that the so-called De Loys’ Ape was revealed to be a hoax based on a manipulated photo of a common spider monkey.

11. HIBAGON

People living around Mt. Hiba in northern Hiroshima during the 1970s claimed to see an ape-like man, shorter than the American Bigfoot and with a coat of reddish brown hair. The so-called Hibagon apparently created such a frenzy that police for a time escorted children to school. One grainy (and not very convincing) picture purports to show the Hibagon, but other than that, there’s no other evidence for this creature.

12. OHIO GRASSMAN

Besides Bigfoot, there are several other monsters said to terrorize North America. There’s Momo in Missouri, the Tuttle Bottoms Monster in Illinois, and of course the Ohio Grassman. According to one Bigfoot enthusiast website, the Grassman looks like an upright chesty gorilla who hangs out in cornfields and is known to kill dogs.

13. SKUNK APE

Roaming the wilds of the Florida Everglades is a man-beast covered in fur that is variously known as the Skunk Ape, Swamp Cabbage Man, or Stink Ape. It’s said to have the odor of rotten eggs—maybe because, as some claim, the Skunk Ape lives in muddy caves. The creature is occasionally drawn to campsites and cabins in search of food, but, according to other reports, the Skunk Ape might be a picky eater. Some say it’s been known to kill deer, tear open the carcass and only eat the liver.

14. MAPINGUARY

In the Brazilian Amazon, people claim to have had encounters with the sluggish and clawed Mapinguary, a name sometimes translated as “the roaring animal” or “the fetid beast.” The legends about this creature could possibly be based on ancient memories of the elephant-sized giant ground sloth, Megatherium. This real-life sloth went extinct in South America a few thousand years ago, but fossil evidence shows that humans once hunted them.

15. MARICOXI

Another apeman said to be hiding out in the rainforests of Brazil is the Maricoxi. A decade before he disappeared while looking for an ancient lost city in the Amazon, explorer Percy Fawcett claimed he saw several Maricoxi in Brazil in 1914. Fawcett described them as “enormous” grunting creatures which were hairy like dogs. In one encounter, he said that he used his gun to scare off one of these bow-and-arrow–armed apemen.