Don’t worry about spending $5 on an iced coffee or a bottle of water when you get past security at the airport. There’s a trick that allows you to bring your own drinks, bypassing the TSA’s annoying 3.4-ounce maximum. Just freeze it, says The Points Guy.
According to the TSA, you can, in fact, freeze liquids to get them past the security checkpoint. Here’s what the agency says:
Frozen liquid items are allowed through the checkpoint as long as they are frozen solid when presented for screening. If frozen liquid items are partially melted, slushy, or have any liquid at the bottom of the container, they must meet 3-1-1 liquids requirements.
The problem, of course, is that once you go through security, you have a frozen-solid bottle of water or iced coffee or whatever. If you just let it melt, you’re going to have a very drippy bottle on your hands. If there’s a microwave or other thawing method in your terminal, you could use that, but the technique might be more useful for a liquid that isn’t water—something more delicious than the airport could offer you. The freezing move might also be useful if your flight is particularly long. If your beauty products have enough water in them to freeze, you could also be taking huge bottles of facial toner through security, presumably.
Library of Congress via Wikimedia // Public Domain
Though Robert Frost has been gone for more than half a century—he died on January 29, 1963—his poems remain timeless, inspiring everyone from John F. Kennedy to George R.R. Martin. Though most people know him for “The Road Not Taken,” there’s more to Frost than that—and according to him, we’ve all been interpreting that poem wrong anyway.
1. HE WAS NAMED AFTER CONFEDERATE GENERAL ROBERT E. LEE.
Frost’s father, Will, ran away from home at a young age in an attempt to join the Confederate Army. Though he was caught and returned to his parents, the elder Frost never forgot his war heroes, and eventually named his son after one of them.
2. HE WAS A COLLEGE DROPOUT—TWICE OVER.
First, Frost attended Dartmouth for just two months, later explaining, “I wasn’t suited for that place.” He got his second chance in 1897 at Harvard, but only made it two years before dropping out to support his wife and child. “They could not make a student of me here, but they gave it their best,” Frost later said. Still, he managed to get a degree anyway—Harvard bestowed honorary honors upon him in 1937.
3. HE MADE $15 FROM THE SALE OF HIS FIRST POEM.
Published by the New York Independent in 1894, when Frost was 20, Frost’s first paid piece was called “My Butterfly: An Elegy.” The payday for the poem was the equivalent of $422 today; the sum was worth more than two weeks’ salary at his teaching job.
4. EZRA POUND HELPED FROST GAIN A FOLLOWING.
As an established poet with a following, Ezra Pound exposed Frost to a much larger audience by writing a rave review of his first poetry collection, A Boy’s Will. Frost considered it his most important early review. Pound might have reviewed the book sooner had it not been for a bit of a misunderstanding—he once gave Frost a calling card with his hours listed as “At home, sometimes.” Frost “didn’t feel that that was a very warm invitation,” and avoided visiting. When he finally stopped in, Pound was put out that he hadn’t come sooner. He wrote his review of Frost’s poetry the same day.
5. HE BELIEVED “THE ROAD NOT TAKEN” WAS VERY MISUNDERSTOOD.
“The Road Not Taken” is often read at high school and college graduations as a reminder to forge new paths, but Frost never intended it to be taken so seriously—he wrote the poem as a private joke for his friend Edward Thomas. He and Thomas enjoyed taking walks together, and Thomas was constantly indecisive about which direction he wanted to go. When he finally did choose, he often regretted not choosing the other way.
Frost was surprised when his readers began taking the poem to heart as a metaphor for self-determination. After reading “The Road Not Taken” to some college students, he lamented to Thomas that the poem was “taken pretty seriously … despite doing my best to make it obvious by my manner that I was fooling. … Mea culpa.”
6. HE WAS THE FIRST POET TO READ AT A PRESIDENTIAL INAUGURATION.
John F. Kennedy invited Frost to do a reading at his 1961 inauguration; though Frost prepared a poem called “Dedication” for the ceremony, he had a hard time reading the lightly typed words in the sun’s glare. In the end, that didn’t matter—the poet ended up reciting a different piece, “The Gift Outright,” by heart.
Frost’s performance paved the way for later appearances by Maya Angelou, Miller Williams, Elizabeth Alexander, and Richard Blanco.
7. HE OUTLIVED FOUR OF HIS SIX CHILDREN.
Frost knew tragedy. Of his six kids—daughters Elinor, Irma, Marjorie, and Lesley, and sons Carol, and Elliot—only two outlasted him. Elinor died shortly after birth, Marjorie died giving birth, Elliot succumbed to cholera, and Carol committed suicide.
8. HE WASN’T MUCH OF A FARMER, ACCORDING TO HIS NEIGHBORS.
Though Frost adored living the bucolic life on his 30-acre farm in Derry, New Hampshire, his neighbors weren’t exactly impressed with his skills. Because Frost mostly paid the bills with poetry, he didn’t have to be as regimented about farm life as his full-time farming neighbors did, so they thought he was a bit lazy.
Even if his farming skills weren’t up to par with the pros, the estate itself did wonders for his writing. According to Frost, “I might say the core of all my writing was probably the five free years I had there on the farm down the road a mile or two from Derry Village toward Lawrence. The only thing we had was time and seclusion. I couldn’t have figured on it in advance. I hadn’t that kind of foresight. But it turned out right as a doctor’s prescription.”
9. HE INSPIRED GEORGE R.R. MARTIN.
If Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire sounds a bit like Frost’s poem “Fire and Ice,” well, it is: “People say I was influenced by Robert Frost’s poem, and of course I was,” Martin has said. “Fire is love, fire is passion, fire is sexual ardor and all of these things. Ice is betrayal, ice is revenge, ice is … you know, that kind of cold inhumanity and all that stuff is being played out in the books.”
10. NO ONE HAS MATCHED HIS PULITZER PRIZE RECORD.
Frost took home the award in poetry a whopping four times. His honors were for New Hampshire: A Poem with Notes and Grace Notes (1924), Collected Poems (1931), A Further Range (1937), and A Witness Tree (1943). No other poet has yet managed to win on four occasions.
The inscription on Frost’s tombstone is his own words: “I had a lover’s quarrel with the world.” It’s the last line from his poem “The Lesson for Today.” Here’s the whole thing:
Mariomassone via Wikimedia Commons // CC BY-SA 2.0
A few months ago, the gears of the future ground to a halt when a curious weasel chewed through the wiring of the Large Hadron Collider. Valiant though the weasel was, it was tragically no match for superconductive wires it came in contact with when it hopped a substation fence. Fans of the weasel will be delighted to learn that its stuffed and slightly singed body will soon go on display at the Rotterdam Natural History Museum in the Netherlands.
The electrocuted weasel (technically a beech marten, Martes foina) is just one small charred part of the museum’s upcoming Dead Animal Tales exhibition, which also includes a hedgehog that got trapped in a McFlurry machine. The program is the brainchild of museum director Kees Moeliker, who’s been collecting weird animal deaths since 1995, when a duck smashed into the museum building. The duck died immediately; alarmingly, this did not prevent it from becoming the object of another duck’s rather forceful affections for a full 75 minutes.
This is actually the second marten to shut down—and be shut down by—the LHC. The first marten struck in April 2016, but someone disposed of the body before the museum could intervene. When it happened again in November, the staff at Cern were ready and put the carcass aside.
“We want to show that no matter what we do to the environment, to the natural world, the impact of nature will always be there,” Moeliker told The Guardian. “We try to put a magnifying glass on some fine examples. This poor creature literally collided with the largest machine in the world, where physicists collide particles every day. It’s poetic, in my opinion, what happened there.”
Online shopping—especially when using saved personal and credit card information—makes it really easy for credit card fraudsters and identity thieves to get their hands on your sensitive info. With a new update, Google Chrome is hoping to put your mind more at ease by alerting you when the website asking for your payment information is unsecure.
According to Engadget, Chrome will now display a red “not secure” warning message in the browser’s address bar when an unsecure page—which Google defines as any site that does not have an HTTPS designation—prompts you to enter your info. This update is a visual reminder that you should only give personal info to sites that begin with HTTPS , which is more secure than the common HTTP.
A second Chrome update (version 56), announced on January 26, makes it so your web pages refresh faster. There are usually two reasons you would refresh a web page, Google software engineer Takashi Toyoshima wrote on the Chromium Blog. One is because a page is unresponsive, and the second is because you want to see fresh content on the page. While the new update addresses both concerns, it was created with the second in mind.
Here’s how it works: Every time you visit a webpage, Chrome launches hundreds of network requests to connect your browser to the website’s servers. And when you reload or refresh the site, this process of requesting access starts over again (this process is called “validation”). With the new update, Chrome only validates the main resource and data that it believes may have been changed or updated between visits. Therefore, you can see fresh information without revalidating the entire page.
According to Facebook, which has a vested interest in its webpages refreshing faster, the new Chrome update allows Facebook pages to refresh 28 percent faster than before. Happy browsing!
A 2002 study by the University of Massachusetts found that 60 percent of adults can’t even make it 10 minutes without telling a little white lie—or a big whopper. Are you part of the 40 percent that can be completely honest for a mere 600 seconds?
In 2003, the BBC asked 140,000 Britons to come up with the nation’s top 100 novels. Just two writers had five works that cracked the top 100: Charles Dickens and the late Sir Terry Pratchett.
Pratchett, who was born in Buckinghamshire on April 28, 1948, wrote or co-wrote more than 70 books during his lifetime. His debut novel, The Carpet People—a slightly-altered version of a fantasy serial Pratchett wrote while working at his local paper, the Bucks Free Press—was published in 1971, followed by the bestselling Discworld series. Set on a magical, disc-shaped world supported by four elephants who in turn ride atop a gigantic turtle, these masterworks of comic fantasy have collectively sold more than 80 million copies worldwide. Here are 10 things they won’t teach you at Unseen University.
1. PRATCHETT WROTE THE FIRST FOUR INSTALLMENTS WHILE WORKING AS A SPOKESMAN FOR NUCLEAR POWER PLANTS.
In 1980, Pratchett left the Bucks Free Press to take a job as a press officer for the Central Electricity Generating Board (CEGB), where his responsibilities mainly involved reassuring the public about the safety of this organization’s nuclear power plants. (It was no easy task; the CEGB hired him just a few months after the Three Mile Island accident in Pennsylvania.) On the side, Pratchett wrote and published the first four Discworld novels: The Colour of Magic, The Light Fantastic, Equal Rites, and Mort. Following their success, he resigned from his CEGB post to write full-time.
2. RINCEWIND’S NAME WAS LIFTED FROM A NEWSPAPER COLUMN.
Many Discworld inhabitants go by peculiar names (just ask Moist von Lipwig or Carrot Ironfoundersson), but many of them don’t come from thin air. “A lot of what people think of as weird names in my books are real names,” he told an interviewer in 2011. Granny Weatherwax, for example, shares her last name with Rudd Weatherwax, who trained several of the Lassie dogs that appeared in various films and television shows.
But not all of Pratchett’s characters were named after real people. Take the bumbling wizard Rincewind, whose name comes from “By the Way,” a humorous newspaper column that ran in The Daily Express from 1919 to 1975. Written for most of that time by J.B. Morgan under the pseudonym “Beachcomber,” this series featured a number of recurring fictional characters, including a red-bearded dwarf named Churm Rincewind.
As a boy, Pratchett was an avid reader of “By the Way,” and while penning The Colour of Magic, he used the name Rincewind without realizing that he’d borrowed it from Morgan’s columns. A Discworld fan later pointed this out to the novelist, at which point Pratchett “went back through all the [published ‘Beachcomber’ anthologies] and found the name and thought, oh, blast, that’s where it came from. And then I thought, what the hell, anyway.” (His argument is slightly weakened by Rincewind saying in the Colour of Magic, “I suppose we’ll take the coast road to Chirm.”)
3. THE SCIENCE OF DISCWORLD SERIES WAS INSPIRED BY A POPULAR STAR TREK BOOK.
The Science of Discworld novels combine fantasy and hard science. In the first of these books, a mishap at Unseen University creates “Roundworld,” a bizarro universe laden with strange, spherical planets governed not by magic but by the laws of physics. The school’s faculty experiments with and explores their creation over the course of the four-book series and the action is interrupted periodically by non-fiction chapters that break down real scientific topics. Written by biologist Jack Cohen and mathematician Ian Stewart, these asides tie into the narrative while educating the reader about everything from evolution to quantum mechanics.
The series had its origins in a meeting between Pratchett and Cohen at a science fiction convention in the Netherlands. At the time, Cohen was co-authoring a book about the evolution of the human intellect with Stewart. Cohen recalled in an interview that the two were having trouble getting “the chapters to gel” and asked Pratchett to advise them; later on, the trio got together at a Mongolian restaurant in Berlin, where Pratchett offered up some tips that made their way into the book’s final draft.
Since all three men were big sci-fi fans, the conversation soon turned to Star Trek. Specifically, they expressed a profound disappointment with Lawrence Krauss’s The Physics of Star Trek, a 1995 bestseller that offered insights on the TV show’s scientific underpinnings. The book did not impress Pratchett, Stewart, or Cohen, the latter of whom called it “bloody awful.” Still, Krauss’s project got Stewart thinking. “I raised the possibility of something similar related to Discworld,” he remembers. At first, the idea was shot down because, in his words, “there is no science in Discworld.”
Still, the concept seemed too good to throw away altogether—and after a while, the three men made a narrative breakthrough. “It took only a few months to find the obvious answer: since there was no science in Discworld, we had to put some there,” Stewart explains. “Instead of producing a scientific commentary on existing events in the Discworld canon, we had to write a fantasy/fact fusion in which an unfolding story of some wizardly brand of science was interlaced with a popular science book. Terry would have to tailor a genuine Discworld short story.”
Tailor one he did. Pratchett put together a 30,000-word short story that was seamlessly punctuated with essays that Stewart and Cohen authored. Once they finished the manuscript, Ebury publishing agreed to put out The Science of Discworld in 1999. Apparently, some company higher-ups didn’t like the book’s chances. “The editor there was made to understand that if it sold less than 10,000 copies, he’d lose his job. If it sold more than 25,000 it would be a miracle. It sold more than 200,000 copies in the first year,” Cohen recently told The Guardian. Three sequels were released between 2002 and 2013.
4. PRATCHETT WITHDREW GOING POSTAL FROM HUGO AWARD CONSIDERATION.
Discworld books have received plenty of accolades: The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents took home the Carnegie Medal in 2001; Night Watch won a Prometheus Award two years later; and Pyramids earned the 1989 British Science Fiction Award for best novel. In 2005, Pratchett’s bestseller Going Postal was nominated for a prestigious Hugo Award. The awards, handed out by the World Science Fiction Society, are seen as some of the highest honors that a sci-fi or fantasy writer can hope to attain. Multiple Hugo categories exist, with “best novel” being the one that usually attracts the most fanfare. (Past winners have included Frank Herbert’s Dune and American Gods by Neil Gaiman.)
Naturally, when an author receives a “best novel” nod, he or she generally doesn’t even consider withdrawing the book in question from Hugo consideration. But that’s exactly what Pratchett did in ’05. The WSFS selects its Hugo winners at Worldcon, the society’s annual convention. Pratchett was in attendance at the 2005 gathering and, as he later explained to his bewildered readers, he chose to pass on a potential best novel award for Going Postal because he felt the selection process would keep him from enjoying the Worldcon. Pratchett thus became only the third writer in history to take his book out of the running in this particular Hugo category. (In the past, authors Robert Silverberg and James Tiptree Jr., had done likewise.)
5. IN 2011, TWO BELOVED DISCWORLD CHARACTERS APPEARED ON SOME NEW POSTAGE STAMPS.
Great Britain is—for all intents and purposes—the birthplace of the modern fantasy genre. To celebrate this contribution to popular culture, the Royal Mail postage service company issued a set of eight commemorative stamps featuring some of the most popular fantastical characters to ever emerge from the UK, including Merlin and Morgan le Fay of Arthurian legend, Voldemort and Dumbledore from Harry Potter, and Aslan and the White Witch from Chronicles of Narnia. The Royal Mail didn’t forget about Discworld’s inhabitants: Rincewind rounded out the set along with the wise old witch Gytha “Nanny” Ogg.
6. THE LAST FEW NOVELS WERE WRITTEN VIA VOICE RECOGNITION SOFTWARE.
In 2007, Pratchett announced that he’d been diagnosed with a kind of early onset Alzheimer’s disease. The disorder severely weakened Pratchett’s memory, rendered certain fonts unreadable, and took away his ability to type. But despite all those major setbacks, Pratchett kept on writing. Once he lost the capacity to operate a keyboard, the author started using voice recognition computer programs in their place. Pratchett dictated manuscripts for entire novels—including the Discworld books Snuff and Raising Steam—through this kind of software. “It really isn’t a problem,” he declared in a 2013 NPR interview. “I’m a bit of a techie anyway, so talking to the computer is no big deal. Sooner or later, everybody talks to their computers—they say, ‘You bastard!’”
7. PRATCHETT RECEIVED THE OCCASIONAL LETTER FROM A TERMINALLY-ILL FAN WHO LOVED DISCWORLD’S VERSION OF DEATH.
Though He’s clad in dark robes and wields a scythe, the Death who appears in all but two Discworld novels isn’t your standard-order Grim Reaper. For one thing, He rides a white horse named Binky. He also likes physics, adores cats, and has a sort of benign fascination with the human experience. Unlike most literary embodiments of death, the figure who graces Discworld comes off as mild-mannered and somewhat compassionate. In 2004’s The Art of Discworld, Pratchett wrote about the fondness that many fans have expressed for the character. “Sometimes,” Pratchett wrote, “I get nice letters from people who know they’re due to meet [Death] soon, and hope I’ve got him right. Those are the kind of letters that cause me to stare at the wall for some time…”
On March 12, 2015, Pratchett died peacefully in his Broad Chalke home. In a way, Discworld’s Death helped announce the sad news to the world. The author had written a short story in the form of four planned tweets; when Pratchett died, his assistant Rob Wilkins logged onto the author’s Twitter account and posted them:
“AT LAST, SIR TERRY, WE MUST WALK TOGETHER. Terry took Death’s arm and followed him through the doors and on to the black desert under the endless night. The end.”
8. THE SHEPHERD’S CROWN WAS SUPPOSED TO END ON A DIFFERENT NOTE.
Five months after Pratchett’s death, the 41st entry in the Discworld series was published. The Shepherd’s Crown features the apparent demise of Granny Weatherwax, whose mentee, Tiffany Aching, is left to unite her fellow witches against a grave threat. According to Gaiman, Pratchett’s good friend and occasional collaborator, the novel was supposed to end with a poignant epilogue. “[It] would have made the book,” Gaiman told The Times, “but he never got to write it.”
The author of American Gods explained that, before Pratchett died, he’d had a conversation with the novelist about how The Shepherd’s Crown was going to wrap up. “When I talked to Terry about it, there was one little beautiful twist that would have made people cry,” Gaiman said. The big surprise involved Weatherwax and a cat named You. Apparently, Pratchett’s unwritten chapter would have revealed that the former didn’t actually die, she’d merely channeled her consciousness into the feline. “And there was going to be the final scene when she said, ‘I am leaving on my own terms now,’ and then Death turns up to take Granny Weatherwax for good,” Gaiman revealed.
9. SONY TRIED TO MAKE A WEE FREE MEN MOVIE.
“I’m allergic to Hollywood,” Pratchett once joked. So far, no Discworld novel has ever been adapted into a theatrically-released film. Still, this isn’t to say that nobody’s ever tried to make one. In 2006, Sony obtained the movie rights to The Wee Free Men, a Discworld story aimed at young adult readers. Evil Dead director Sam Raimi was set to direct, but the movie never passed the development phase because Pratchett wasn’t a fan of the script. “It contained everything that The Wee Free Men actually campaigns against,” he said. “Everything about [the book] was the opposite of Disney. But the studio had kind of Disneyfied it, to make it understandable to American filmmakers.”
Speaking of Disney, rumor has it that the directors of Aladdin were working on a movie version of Mort—the fourth Discworld book—as recently as 2011. Allegedly, the idea was shelved for some reason, which opened the door for another project called Moana.
10. A NEW DISCWORLD TV SERIES HAS BEEN IN DEVELOPMENT SINCE 2011.
Discworld may never have graced the silver screen, but a few novels have been adapted for other mediums. In 1990, playwright Stephen Briggs became the first person to ever dramatize one of Terry Pratchett’s novels when he wrote a stage adaptation of the Discworld book Wyrd Sisters for the Studio Theatre Club in Abingdon, Oxon. The show premiered in 1991, and it had no trouble finding an audience: Wyrd Sisters sold out almost instantly, as did Briggs’s subsequent adaptations of Men at Arms, Making Money, The Fifth Elephant, and many other Discworld classics. There have also been radio dramatizations of Discworld: Beginning in 1992, BBC Radio 4 aired six serials based on Guards! Guards!, Wyrd Sisters, Mort, Small Gods, Night Watch, and Eric.
Television has seen its fair share of Discworld stories, too. Sky Productions, for example, has released made-for-TV films based on Hogfather, The Colour of Magic, and Going Postal. And we may soon be in for a CSI-style Ankh-Morpork drama. Although Pratchett’s daughter, Rhianna, has declared that she’ll never give anyone—including herself—permission to write a new Discworld novel, she’s been working on an original “crime of the week” TV series that will follow Sam Vimes and his fellow city watchmen on some original adventures. Titled The Watch, the show’s development began in 2011 with Pratchett’s enthusiastic blessing.
On Valentine’s Day, BBC viewers can fall asleep to the soothing sound of British actor Tom Hardy’s voice. Earlier this winter, on New Year’s Eve, Hardy—joined by his dog, Woodstock—made an appearance on the network’s CBeebies anthology series, a children’s program featuring actors reading bedtime stories. Now, NME reports, the dynamic duo is slated to return to the show on February 14. Hardy will read The Cloudspotter by Tom McLaughlin, Woodstock will sit there looking cute, and children (and quite possibly their caretakers) will drift into slumber.
Parents may be confused to see Hardy reading fuzzy bedtime stories to their kids on TV after getting to know him as the titular character in Mad Max: Fury Road (2015), or as villains like Bane in 2012’s The Dark Knight Rises or John Fitzgerald in 2015’s The Revenant. In real life, the tough-guy actor is actually a dad to two kids, which may explain why he’s now sharing his paternal side with the world.
You’ll have to wait until next month to catch Hardy’s Valentine’s Day guest spot, but you can view a clip of his New Year’s Eve appearance—featuring the actor reading You Must Bring a Hat by Simon Philip—below.
One of the most time-honored theater traditions is also one of the most morbid. Sometimes, when actors or very serious Shakespeare fans take their final bows, they bequeath their skulls to an acting company to be used as the skull of Yorick, the target of Hamlet’s “Alas, poor Yorick” monologue.
Though it’s hard to pinpoint exactly when and where the tradition began, it likely goes back to at least the early 1800s, when famed Shakespearean actor Junius Brutus Booth reportedly found himself on the receiving end of an unexpected gift. The story goes that Booth once befriended a man he shared a jail cell with, but while Booth was released, his friend was eventually hanged. The man told his jailers that his head should be sent to Booth and used in Hamlet. The Players Club in New York City, which Booth’s son Edwin (brother of John Wilkes Booth) once owned, still has the skull said to have belonged to Junius Booth’s unfortunate friend. (While it’s clear that a real skull passed from Junius Booth to his son and was used in Hamlet, it’s difficult to prove the original owner was Booth’s cellmate.) The skull now bears the handwritten legend, “And the rest is silence.”
Another early documented instance is that of John “Pop” Reed, a stagehand at the Walnut Street Theatre in Philadelphia. After more than half a century working at the Walnut, Reed had developed a love for the Bard and stated in his will that he wanted to live on as Hamlet’s deceased jester. The Walnut granted his wish, and Reed’s remains reside there to this day.
But the most famous Yorick is probably André Tchaikowsky, the Polish composer and pianist. When he died in 1982, the performer added his name to the list of people wanting to act from beyond the grave. A passionate Shakespeare fan who was often moved by Royal Shakespeare Company performances, Tchaikowsky willed his dome to the company. They stuck it on a roof for two years to dry and bleach it, then began using it in rehearsals. Oscar-winning actor Mark Rylance (Bridge of Spies) rehearsed with it, but the RSC eventually felt the skull was inappropriate to use in an actual performance; a cast was used instead.
Don’t worry: Tchaikowsky’s mortal remains did get their moment in the spotlight. In 2008, actor David Tennant held the composer’s skull aloft in his 22 performances as Hamlet at the Courtyard Theatre in Shakespeare’s hometown of Stratford-Upon-Avon. Though it was originally reported that a fake was used, director Gregory Doran later explained that he didn’t want the skull’s story to become the focus of the production, and so had fibbed a little.
Sadly, not all those who ask are able to serve as Yorick. Comedian Del Close left his noggin to Chicago’s Goodman Theatre when he died in 1999, but his widow was unable to find anyone willing to clean it, and Close’s wish went unanswered. In 1995, an actor who dreamed of performing onstage with the Royal Shakespeare Company—yet who had been repeatedly rejected—figured he would audition from the afterlife by bequeathing his skull to the company. He told The Independent, “I may not know what my next job will be, but I want to ensure I know what my last job will be.” Alas, the RSC declined him once again.
The story of slavery in the United States is one of brutality, splintered families, and erasure. For many descendants of enslaved people, genealogies and other family histories can break down, severed by the missing links that resulted when families were broken up and sold to separate masters. An artifact in the Smithsonian’s new National Museum of African American History and Culture preserves a tiny attempt to fight back against that erasure. It’s known as “Ashley’s sack.”
The unbleached cotton sack is the canvas for 56 words of embroidery—words with a tragic tale to tell. “My great grandmother Rose mother of Ashley gave her this sack when she was sold at age 9 in South Carolina,” it reads. “It held a tattered dress 3 handfulls of pecans a braid of Roses hair. Told her It be filled with my Love always she never saw her again Ashley is my grandmother Ruth Middleton 1921.”
The story of Rose, Ashley, and Ruth was common among millions of enslaved African Americans. It’s been estimated that one-quarter of all enslaved people who crossed the Atlantic were children, and 48 percent were put to work before they turned 7 years old. Though slaves did manage to form family units, those families were generally disregarded by masters, who viewed them as chattel. Thus, slaves always ran the risk of being separated from their families—even children as young as 9-year-old Ashley.
When the sack—incredibly rare to have survived both slavery and the centuries—was purchased at a flea market in Tennessee in 2007, its origins were murky. As the Associated Press reports, the woman who discovered the sack realized it was valuable, but decided not to sell it on eBay. After some online research, she determined that the sack might have been connected to Middleton Place, a South Carolina plantation that is now a National Historic Landmark and museum and where African Americans were once enslaved. Museum officials purchased the sack and put it on display.
Reactions to the powerful story told on the bag were immediate and complex. Some volunteers felt overwhelmed or uncomfortable discussing the object. “Some volunteer guides complained that the sack, and the powerful reactions it engendered, distracted from the core mission of the tour: to highlight the wealth, political leadership, and cosmopolitanism of the white Middletons,” writes anthropologist historian Mark Auslander.
Intrigued by the bag, Auslander set out on a quest to discover the identity of Rose, Ashley, and Ruth. He used slavery records as well as bank, court, and census data to research the women. But he faced a number of obstacles: slave records often involve mass sales of unnamed women and children, many records have been destroyed, and Rose was a very common name for enslaved women.
The name Ashley, however, was not. His answers aren’t definitive, but Auslander did find intriguing evidence of a child named Ashley owned by a South Carolina planter named Robert Martin in the 1850s, who also owned a woman named Rose. Using 1920 census records, Auslander was also able to find an African-African woman named Ruth Middleton who had family roots in South Carolina, and who died in Philadelphia in 1988. Her possessions likely ended up being given away, which is how the sack found its way to the flea market, Auslander theorizes.
No matter how the bag got to that flea market, it’s near-priceless evidence of what slavery did to families and what they suffered both together and apart. Middleton House lent the bag to the NMAAHC, where it—and its story—is now displayed across from a block used in slave auctions.
Restoration experts working on a diorama from Pittburgh’s Carnegie Museum of Natural History recently uncovered a major surprise, according to the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. The famous “Arab Courier Attacked by Lions” diorama contains human remains.
The diorama first debuted in Paris in 1867, and has been on display since Andrew Carnegie bought it in 1899. Conservators recently took it out from under protective glass to clean it, x-raying it during the restoration process. They found that not only do some of the taxidermied animals in the scene contain occasional bones, including skulls, leg bones, and some vertebrae, but the human figure is made with a real skull.
The figure riding a dromedary camel in the diorama was created by the Verreaux brothers, who already had a penchant for using human remains in their work. They controversially taxidermied the corpse of a man from a southern African tribe in the 1830s. Researchers already knew that the Carnegie-housed diorama contained human teeth, but the recent CT scan of the body showed that “Arab” rider’s head contains an entire human skull. Museum researchers have not been able to trace the origins of the skull yet, so they can’t return it anywhere for reburial.
Because the rider mannequin isn’t an accurate reflection of what an Arab from North Africa would have looked like at the time, the museum has given the diorama a new name. “Lion Attacking a Dromedary” will be unveiled once again at the museum in a new location on January 28.
