Sierra
New York City’s Swimmobile was a swimming pool mounted on a truck and sent into neighbourhoods without easy access to one. During the 1960s and 1970s, the vehicles parked in city streets for the day, let children swim in shifts, then rolled away at night. By 1976, five Swimmobiles were travelling from Randalls Island across all five boroughs. New York addressed the shortage of swimming pools by putting several in traffic.
The Stipa-Caproni was an experimental Italian aircraft built in 1932 around a hollow, barrel-shaped fuselage. Its engine and propeller sat inside the tube, making the entire aeroplane one enormous ducted fan with two open cockpits perched on top. It flew quietly and was so stable that test pilots found it difficult to change direction, but the barrel created enough drag to limit its speed to 131 km/h.
The Self-Transcendence 3100 Mile Race is the world’s longest certified footrace, held around a single ordinary block in Queens, New York. Competitors have 52 days to complete 5,649 laps, running from six in the morning until midnight and averaging nearly 60 miles a day. The route passes a high school, a playground and the same collection of parked cars. Runners reverse direction each morning. Everything else remains exactly where it was.
Salt glaciers are slow-moving rivers of rock salt formed when underground salt domes break through the Earth’s surface and spread downhill under their own weight. Most occur in southern Iran, where dark and pale flows several kilometres long creep through the Zagros Mountains. They develop folds and crevasses like ice glaciers but survive only in extremely dry climates: some rain helps the salt move, while too much simply dissolves it.
Saya Hnin-Mahla was a Burmese snake charmer and ritual priestess known for performing with king cobras. In footage shot around 1939 by wildlife documentarian Armand Denis, she faces a large cobra with her hands held behind her back. She moves with the raised animal, avoids its lunges, then bends forward and kisses it on the head three times. Afterwards, she simply turns and walks away.
SLABs are heavily customized cars that emerged from Houston’s Black neighbourhoods in the 1980s. The name is often expanded as “Slow, Loud and Bangin’,” which also serves as instructions. Usually built from large American sedans, they feature candy paint, whitewall tyres, elaborate trunks and wire wheels called swangas, whose spokes extend sideways into traffic.
Scraper bikes are ordinary bicycles transformed with brightly coloured tape, foil and paint, usually arranged in geometric patterns across the wheels. The style emerged in East Oakland in the mid-2000s.
Reaching the 1912 Stockholm Olympics required Shizo Kanaguri to travel for 18 days by ship and the Trans-Siberian Railway, followed by five days of rest. Thirty kilometres into the marathon, he stopped at a house for water, lay down on a couch and awoke the following morning. Ashamed, he returned to Japan without formally withdrawing and was considered missing in Sweden for decades. In 1967, aged 76, he returned to complete the race. His final time of 54 years, 8 months, 6 days, 5 hours, 32 minutes and 20.3 seconds remains the slowest in Olympic marathon history.
Sheikh Hamad bin Hamdan Al Nahyan is an Emirati royal and car collector better known as the Rainbow Sheikh, after ordering seven Mercedes in the colours of the rainbow. His collection contains hundreds of vehicles, including a giant Willys Jeep, a three-times-scale Hummer H1, a ten-wheeled SUV and an enormous Dodge Power Wagon with living quarters inside. Many are fully functional. For Sheikh Hamad, the boundary between an automobile and a building appears to be an unnecessary technicality.
The passenger manifest for British South American Airlines (BSAA) flight CS-59 might have made a perfect character list for a murder-mystery. Aboard were two businessman friends touring South America on the lookout for trade opportunities: a fun-loving Swiss and a self-made English executive. Also travelling were a Palestinian man who was rumoured to have a diamond stitched into his jacket, and a South American agent of the Dunlop tyre company who had once been the tutor to Prince Michael of Romania. The oldest passenger was in her seventies, a widow of German extraction returning to her Chilean home after an inconvenient World War had unexpectedly extended her stay abroad. And to add a whiff of espionage, a member of a select corps of British civil servants known as King’s Messengers joined the flight, carrying a diplomatic bag bound for the UK embassy across the border. The date was August 2nd, 1947, and the flight was scheduled to depart from Buenos Aires, Argentina, bound for Santiago, Chile. The intrepid voyagers were to fly in the Star Dust, a shiny Lancastrian aircraft derived from the legendary Avro Lancaster World War II bomber. Its aircrew were ex-Royal Air Force to a chap, and the machine was captained by an experienced and decorated wartime flyer named Reginald Cook. Traversing the Andes Mountains in atrocious winter weather was an undertaking that would demand all his knowledge and skills, yet the journey should have been well within the capabilities of both man and machine. The dependable airliner could fly at speeds of 310 miles per hour and at altitudes of well over 20,000 feet— higher than most aircraft of the time and sufficient to clear the tallest peaks in the area. Reginald Cook had been recruited to the airline from the elite RAF Bomber Command Pathfinder Force, and like all BSAA pilots had received additional navigational training. The crew maintained Morse-code radio contact with the ground for the duration of the flight, and just before it was scheduled to arrive they signalled their approach. But then a mysterious signal was received at Santiago airfield—comprising the letters “S-T-E-N-D-E-C”. Aware of no such Morse abbreviation, the radioman at Santiago requested a repeat of the signal, and the same cryptic message was received twice more. This inexplicable message was the last one received from flight CS-59; it answered subsequent signals with silence, and it never arrived at its destination. Mount Tupungato Mount Tupungato An extensive aerial search was mounted, while the Chilean and Argentine armies combed the area on foot. No trace of Star Dust was found. For over fifty years the disappearance ranked as one of the greatest unsolved mysteries of the aviation world, and a lively and inventive mythology grew up around the incident.