STUFF: News, Technology, the cool and the plain weird

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PLAYING WITH FIRE

In preparation for the opening of his latest restaurant, Mabel's BBQ, renowned chef and restaurateur Michael Symon traveled the country tasting the best smoked delicacies he could find. Playing with Fire: BBQ and More from the Grill, Smoker, and Fireplace brings together over 70 recipes inspired by both his travels and his latest Cleveland eatery. As such, inside you'll find dishes influenced by barbecue hotspots like Memphis, Kansas City, and Texas, as well as some born from Symon's Rust Belt home. Also included are tips on working with different types of smokers and grills, how to choose the best woods, and pairing your proteins with appropriate sauces and sides. $18

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WHITLEY NEILL GIN

Inspired by a rich English distilling heritage and his wife's African roots, Johnny Neill crafted this London Dry Gin using a unique blend of botanicals. Neill comes from a famous family of UK distillers, and the eighth generation gin maker uses a 100-year-old copper pot still to create his spirits. This handcrafted dry gin uses some traditional botanicals and some that are less common like Florentine Iris root from Italy to sharpen the citrus notes along with African botanicals like Physalis fruit and extracts from the Baobab Tree which is known as the Tree of Life.

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Forget the Caribbean: Was Rum Invented in India?

When rum was invented it was already at least a thousand years old.

I’d better explain. For every cultural phenomenon, be it Russian formalism, country line dancing or the production of a distilled spirit from the juice of the sugar cane or the byproducts of its refining (that is, making rum), there is a both a history and a History.

The latter, with the capital H, is the story that we know and can more or less agree upon; the one with a firm beginning, a cast of characters and a clear narrative arc. All its paperwork is in order, with actual documents of one sort or another holding up every corner.

The former, plain old history, is what really happened, whether we know it or not. Sometimes the official story seems to tack pretty closely with it; we’ve got documents that tell us, for instance, what happened pretty much every minute during the Battle of Waterloo. Other times they seem to pull in different directions and all we can see of the real story from our vantage point are hints and glimpses, shining occasionally out of an almost undocumented murk. If there’s a narrative in there, an orderly course of events, we can’t find it. But every once in a while, we’re able to uncover another documentary foundation point, deep in that murk, and use it to winch the arc of History in a new direction, a little bit closer to what was really going on.

Which brings us to rum. The start line for the spirit’s History has traditionally been drawn on the Caribbean island of Barbados in 1645, give or take a year, with English colonists responsible for its invention. A few modern historians take a somewhat wider view. Frederick H. Smith, in his groundbreaking 2005 study Caribbean Rum, observes that cane distillation was recorded in Martinique in 1640, and that it may have been brought to both that island and Barbados by Dutch colonists fleeing the Portuguese reconquest of northern Brazil, occupied by the Dutch since 1630. The Dutch may have started the practice there or picked it up from the Portuguese colonists.

The French historian Alain Huetz de Lemps reaches a little deeper into the murk in his comprehensive 1997 Histoire du rhum to add that, even if direct documentary or archeological evidence is lacking, it is nonetheless “quite possible that the Portuguese or the Spanish had practiced [sugar cane] distillation since the sixteenth century in their Atlantic island holdings (Madeira, the Canaries) or their American colonies.”

THE OTHER RUM

We’ll get back to these theories. First, however, I’d like to reach yet further into that murk, and further by quite a bit, and highlight a few documents that have not been generally included in the History of rum. They come not from the Caribbean, or the New World at all, but from Asia. In the absence of a comprehensive history of distillation in that vast, and vastly diverse, continent, they are widely scattered and lacking in context, but that does not mean they should be left out of the History of rum, as thus far most have been.

The first is a section of the Ain-i-Akbari, the “Constitution of Akbar,” a work (in Persian) compiled around 1590 by Abu’l Fazl ibn Mubarak, Grand Vizier to Akbar, the Moghul Emperor of India, whose realm, encompassing northern India, parts of Afghanistan and the eastern parts of Iran, held a fifth of the world’s population. In a survey of all the useful plants to be found in that empire, Abu’l Fazl includes a section on sugar cane.  After briefly discussing the types of cane and their cultivation, he adds (in H. Blochmann’s 1873 translation) that “sugarcane is also used for the preparation of intoxicating liquor.”

First, he explains, the cane is pounded together with acacia bark (here, I believe, as preservative) and then the juice is fermented for a week or longer. Sometimes unrefined sugar is added, or other aromatics, or even pieces of meat. Then the liquid is strained and sometimes drunk as is. However, as Abu’l Fazl adds, “it is mostly employed for the preparation of arrack.”

Like “salsa,” “arrack,” also written as “rack,” is one of those words that, though they have perfectly clear equivalents in English, are rarely translated, thus making the things they designate sound exotic. In this case, the word means simply “distilled spirit” and is applied to local spirits from the Eastern Mediterranean all the way to the Indonesian archipelago, encompassing a variety of liquors as different from each other as mezcal and Cherry Heering. In India alone, in the 1500s, it could be made from, among other things, palm sap, cashew fruit, mahua-tree leaves or, as in this case, sugar cane.

Abu’l Fazl then goes on to describe precisely how this cane arrack is made, detailing—and quite accurately—the three different kinds of still used (to modern students of the history of distillation these are known as the “Gandharan,” for which see below, the “Mongolian” and the “Chinese”) and adding that “some distil the arrack twice, when it is called Duátasha, or twice burned; it is very strong.”

Unfortunately, when it comes to context for this rum (because if this isn’t rum, by the modern definition, nothing is), the Vizier gives us nothing: neither where it is made nor how it is consumed and by whom.

The geography part, at least, is easy: although cane was grown in various parts of the Indian subcontinent, its historical heartland was a broad swath of territory running along the Himalayas from Kandahar, in what is now Afghanistan, all the way through Lahore and Delhi and Calcutta to the Bay of Bengal. By the 1500s, the industry was centered in the province of Bengal—modern Bangladesh.

As for its consumption, we know one thing: its use need not have been confined to the empire’s non-Muslim subjects. The Moghuls were imperfect Muslims in this respect, and alcohol was frequently consumed at all levels of Moghul society, right up to the very Emperors themselves, all of whom were topers, and some of them to notorious excess.

It wasn’t just the Moghuls, though, as another document fished out of the murk, the Tarikh-i-Firuzshahi, or History of Firuz Shah, shows. Written by the historian Zia ud-Din Barani in the mid-1300s, more than two centuries before the Moghul conquest, the book describes an incident in 1302, when Alauddin Khalji, the ruthless and powerful leader of the Delhi Sultanate, tried to prohibit the manufacture and sale of alcohol in that city. It didn’t work, of course; the spirits sellers simply (in Irfan Habib’s 2011 translation of the passage) “set up bhattîs (stills) within their houses, and put in them wine made of granulated sugar (qand) and distilled it (chakânîdand, literally, ‘made it trickle down drop by drop’), and consumed it and secretly sold it at high prices.” The usual smuggling, price gouging and criminality followed. Eventually, the Sultan relented and allowed private distillation and consumption.

Yet even this isn’t the first documented appearance of rum in India (and for those who say this Delhi spirit can’t be rum because it’s made from actual sugar, rather than molasses or sugar cane juice, I will note that many modern micro-distilled American spirits labeled and sold as rum are also made of granulated sugar of various states of refinement, and that some of them even taste like rum). Our next lassoed document predates Islam in the region.

In 630 and 631 AD, Xuanzang, a Chinese Buddhist monk, traveled in Gandhara, the ancient Northern Indian kingdom centered on modern Kandahar, and Kashmir. There, he found a mix of Buddhists and Hindus. Among the latter, the Kshatriyas, the military caste, drank “wines from the vine and the sugar cane.” The Brahmins, priests and teachers who were forbidden alcohol, drank “syrup of grapes and of sugar cane.” The Vaisyas, the merchants and farmers, however drank “a strong distilled spirit.” This spirit is not explicitly identified, at least not in Thomas Watters’ 1904 translation of Xuanzang’s book. But it is no leap at all to assume that, even if some was made from grapes, at least some of it was made from sugar cane. People distil what is available.

Beyond this, a thousand years before the appearance of rum in the Caribbean, documentation fails. That doesn’t mean that the prehistory of the spirit can’t be pushed still further back, at least conjecturally. In J. H. Galloway’s 1989 history of the sugar cane industry, the standard academic work on the topic, he concludes that Northern India, while not the original home of the cane, was the place where people first learned to process it; to boil down the juice until the sugar crystallizes and separate the crystals from the molasses. It was there—in Gandhara, in fact—that in 326 BC Alexander the Great’s army famously found reeds there that (as Nearchos, one of his officers, put it) “produce honey without there being honey bees.”

But sugar-making wasn’t the only industrial process for which Gandhara was an early center. A series of archeological excavations conducted from the 1930s into the 1960s at various sites in the old kingdom produced a great deal of evidence that, as Raymond Allchin argued in the journal South Asian Archeology in 1979, “distillation was known and used for the strengthening of alcohol in north India, at least, since the 5th century BC.”

This evidence, found at sites such as Taxila, Shaikhan Dheri, Sirkap, Rang Mahal and a number more besides, is in the form of clay fragments of pot stills: heating pots, still-heads with outlet spouts, connecting pipes, large condenser pots that the connecting pipes feed into, and water basins to cool the condenser pots (the same kind of still was still being used in the subcontinent in the nineteenth century, as several travelers’ accounts and even photographs demonstrate). What’s more, such is the volume of evidence that it cannot be dismissed as showing mere scientific experimentation, but rather a fully-developed industry, with dedicated distilleries where ranks of stills were worked in the back and (as finds of stacks and stacks of drinking cups show) customers were served in the front.

The question of what precisely the Gandharans were distilling still stands. Someday, it will be possible to answer that by DNA-testing residues scraped from some of those fragmentary stills; right now, though, Afghanistan and Pakistan are not the best places to conduct archeological research into the history of beverage alcohol. It is easy to posit, however, that since sugar cane was what the Gandharans had, it would have certainly been one of the things that they distilled, either in the form of raw juice, or diluted molasses or raw sugar.

Some evidence to support that supposition can be found in Vedic literature; in Sanskrit sacred texts from the first millennium BC. Various terms found there have been taken to refer to distillation, although none of them definitively in and of itself. Taken in concert with the archeological evidence, however, they are persuasive. Among the drinks mentioned in the undated Matsyasukta Tantra, for instance are one called gaudi (elsewhere it appears as karikana or maireya), distilled (apparently) from molasses, cheese curds and hemp, and one from sugar cane juice, plums and curds. If these were indeed distilled, they would have to be classified as rums—weird ones, to be sure (and in the case of the former quite intoxicating), but not much weirder than some of the flavored rums on the market today. (I’m looking at you, Bacardi Dragon Berry.)

Despite the painstaking and conservative construction of Allchin’s argument and the similar, equally persuasive, argument Joseph Needham and his associates offered in Volume V of his epic Science and Civilization in China (1974), historians of spirits have not yet generally assimilated this evidence. Instead, they prefer to stick with the traditional, shopworn theory of a European/Mediterranean origin for the practice, even trying to explain the new evidence away by arguing that distillation must have been brought to India by Alexander and his Greeks (in fact, the opposite is far more likely). This position is no longer tenable. Distilling, as far as can be proven, began in India, and so did rum.

FROM RACK TO RUM

The big question that remains is that of the connection, if any, between sugar cane distillation in India and sugar cane distillation in the Caribbean and South America. It’s not an easy one to answer.

The first modern Europeans to establish direct trade routes with India were the Portuguese navigator Vasco de Gama and his men, in 1498. At their landfall in Calicut, on India’s southwest coast, they were greeted with, among other things, lengths of sugar cane. They must have encountered arrack as well—the region, which specialized in palm arrack, was one of the centers of Indian distilling. Alas, the only eyewitness account of the journey is not interested in such trivia as what they ate and drank.

By 1508, at least, Portuguese merchants in India were already trading in the palm spirit, and in quantity—between 1510 and 1515, for instance, Francisco Corbinel, a trader in the main Portuguese outpost of Goa, shipped 2,426 large jars of it, while in 1512 the Nazareth, a Portuguese freighter that traded in the region, was being provisioned with it.

Among the things de Gama’s men had learned was that in Bengal, which they had yet to reach, “there is plenty of sugar.” By the late 1510s, independent Portuguese traders began sniffing around the region (as a part of the powerful Moghul empire, it was in no danger of being colonized by them). Unfortunately, the sources I have available don’t discuss their reaction to the strong arrack made there. Complicating things is the fact that in the 1500s Europeans did not generally identify spirits by their base materials. What we would call brandy, rum and whiskey were all aqua vitae, aqua ardens, or aqua fortis, or the Portuguese, Spanish, English, Dutch or other vernacular equivalents of those Latin terms—“water of life,” “burning water” or “strong water”—or, in Asia, just plain “arrack.” Only in the mid-1600s did the Bangla cane arrack get its own, fixed identity, when English traders dubbed it “Bengal arrack” and were willing to pay a 33-percent premium for it over the generally weaker palm arrack, or “Goa arrack.”

Before that, however, unless circumstances required further specificity, arrack was arrack. It was also what the Portuguese drank in India when they couldn’t get any wine, which was Portugal’s leading export by far and a powerful status symbol among overseas Portuguese and a major point of connection to their homeland. (Those who could get, or afford, no wine would steep raisins in locally-purchased arrack in an attempt to produce something at least remotely familiar.) We can assume that in the 1510s, when Portuguese traders and soldiers of fortune, working independently from the colonial government in Goa, began settling on the Bengal coast, they had to rely even more on the local arrack than the Goan colonists, being farther removed from their homeland and working outside the official colonial system and its supply chain.

By the end of the 1500s, when there were some 7,500 Portuguese and part-Portuguese (the soldiers of fortune had behaved as such men do) living in Bengal, some, at least, must have been conversant with how the local arrack was made—that kind of knowledge, after all, tends to follow trade. If you’re going to buy and sell something, you’re going to learn what you can about it, if only to make sure you don’t get ripped off. And some of those men must have gone to the New World: in the late 1500s, Portugal began exploring ways of binding its Asian and American possessions closer together. In 1588, the Portuguese king even issued a decree that Indian cotton weavers should be lured to Brazil to establish their industry there, although it is unclear to what degree this scheme was carried out. Meanwhile, Portuguese fleets returning from India frequently took advantage of favorable winds to call in at Brazil to replenish their supplies.

Unfortunately, the history of distillation in Brazil is one of the places where the murk is at its deepest, and if there is evidence that the Indian experience with making cane spirits influenced American practice, it is well hidden. The earliest clearly documented reference to distillation in Brazil dates only to 1611, when distilling equipment was listed in the inventory of the effects of the late widow Maria Jorge, of São Paulo.

The raw materials for rum were never in short supply there: large-scale engenhos—water-powered sugar mills—were up and running as early as the 1520s, and indeed sugar was Brazil’s greatest export. Despite many modern claims that distilling was practiced at these establishments since the beginning, the actual historical record is remarkably uncooperative. Their surviving documents and descriptions make no mention of still houses, distilling or spirits, nor (as far as I can determine) has whatever archeology that has been conducted on their ruins yielded anything of the sort. There is, for example, no mention of distilling in the detailed sixteenth-century records of the large engenho Sergipe in Bahia, one of the most productive in Brazil. The only sugar cane beverages mentioned by European travelers to Brazil during the 1500s appear to be fermented only or even non-alcoholic.

That may not be the end of the story, though. Government records, accounts penned by gentlemen travelers and excavations of industrial facilities might not be the places to look for traces of rum making in Brazil. After all, it was official Portuguese policy to stifle any competition to the business of exporting wine to the colonies, so one can hardly expect to find still houses as part of the early engenhos. There would be no official market for such an enterprise’s product. The colonists who could afford it drank wine from the home country; those who couldn’t—well, let’s just say they tend to leave few footprints in the historical record. At the bottom rungs of Portuguese society in Brazil were a shadowy passel of cane-growers, miners, soldiers, sailors, small artisans and what-have you. Some of these people would have also been in India: during the late 1500s, as Brazilian sugar revenues rose, the Portuguese shifted their resources there from India and Asia, and that would have included people with experience in the tropics. Below this group were the mass of enslaved West Africans who, from the 1550s, did all the actual hard work, along with the surviving indigenous peoples.

In 1610, François Pyrard de Laval, a French traveler on his way back to Europe from India, stopped off in Bahia, Brazil’s easternmost province. There, he found people making “wine from sugar cane, which is cheap, and which is only for slaves and natives of the place.” Elsewhere in his book, however, he applies the same term, vin or “wine,” to the “arac” of Goa. In fact, to go with the lack of differentiation between spirits, until the 1600s many European languages did not differentiate between fermented and distilled drinks, using “wine” for both.

At the end of the 1500s, distilled spirits had become a familiar product in West Africa, at least if we can believe the accounts of Dierick Ruiters and Pieter van den Broecke, Dutch sailors who both visited the region in the first decade of the 1600s. It is easy to construct a hypothesis that, at some point in the last half of the 1500s, there was a technology exchange between individuals on the lower rungs of Portuguese society, familiar with cane distillation from their experience in India, and enslaved Africans, in desperate straits and seeking any source of escape. The stills used would not be expensive copper alembics, the kinds of things that any archeologist can identify, but improved devices, perhaps on the Chinese or Mongolian model, as described by Abu’l Fazl: a large pot on a low fire with a small pot propped up inside it (with or without a tube draining out the side of the larger pot) and a third pot of cold water sealing the top, causing alcohol to condense on the bottom of it and drip into the small pot. Such operations leave behind very little that is identifiable.

By 1611, when Maria Jorge departed this world, leaving her still behind, this cane distilling must have begun climbing up the ladder of Portuguese colonial society; it might have been a guilty pleasure, but the spirit thus made was undeniably strong and very cheap. In 1622 to 1623, there is a record of the management of engenho Sergipe officially issuing the stuff to its enslaved workers, no matter what the colonial powers-that-be had to say. By 1650, only a couple of years after rum is first found in Barbados, Brazilian traders were beginning to sell huge amounts of cane spirit in Africa in open defiance of the motherland.

There are other ways sugar-cane distilling could have spread from the Old World to the New. The Spanish tried making sugar on the large island of Hispaniola (the modern Haiti and Dominican Republic) in the early 1500s, using African slaves who, as Bartolomé de las Casas recalled in 1561, had shortened their lives by their high consumption of “beverages they make from the sweet juice of the cane and drink.” Is it possible that these were distilled? Of course.

It is also possible that cane distillation came to America via the Jesuits, who had explored Bengal and had many holdings in Brazil and Spanish America. In 1988, John and Christian Daniels posited that in the late 1500s the Jesuits brought the efficient vertical-roller cane mill, another key part of the colonial American sugar cane industry, there from China. There is for that a similar mix of a great deal of circumstantial evidence and a lack of direct, documentary proof.

The Dutch, too, might have had a role beyond their likely one of spreading distilling know-how to Barbados and Martinique: in their own Asian colony of Batavia (modern-day Jakarta) Chinese distillers under their direction were already adding molasses or other sugar byproducts to the rice- and palm wine-spirit they were making. Like the Portuguese, the Dutch tended to shift resources and personnel between hemispheres as needed.  

Ultimately, however, we may never know precisely what happened; how—or even if—a traditional Asian spirit of great antiquity gained a small footstep in a new land and then blew it out of all proportion. But that’s what the New World did: scraps and remnants of Old-World cultural practice were dropped here, found fertile soil, and grew into cornerstones of a rough-and-ready new civilization. If it took Asians, Africans, Europeans and Native Americans to make rum, the spirit of the Americas, then that seems just about right, since it took all those groups to make the Americas as we know them, both North and South.

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Astronomers Found 10 New Moons Circling Jupiter

Scientists announced that they have discovered 10 previously unknown moons orbiting Jupiter. This brings the gaseous behemoth’s total moon count up to 79.

The team, led by astronomer Scott Sheppard, first spotted some of the new moons while looking for exceptionally distant objects at the brim of our Solar System, beyond Pluto, using the Blanco 4m telescope at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile.

Jupiter just happened to be in their view, and they noticed a handful of new objects near the planet, between just 1km and 4km in diameter. After tracking the objects’ orbits for about a year with other Chilean telescopes, in addition to some in Arizona and Hawaii, the scientists were able to confirm them as moons.

Last year, this same team announced the discovery of two other moons, which brought Jupiter’s total at the time to a very nice 69.

Two of the newly-discovered moons orbit close to Jupiter — though not as close as the large, Galilean moons: Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto. These moons are “prograde moons,” meaning they orbit Jupiter in the same direction the planet spins.

Because their orbits put them near other prograde moons, they’re thought to be bits of a larger moon that was broken apart by a collision long ago.

Seven of the new moons orbit a bit further out, and in the opposite direction, making them retrograde moons. There’s a throng of other retrograde moons in that further-out region, which fall into three distinct groupings of similar orbits. The researchers think those three groups were once three larger moons that were also broken apart by collisions.

And then there’s the tenth moon — the oddball. It orbits in the same general path as all of the retrograde moons, but in the opposite, prograde direction.

Sheppard told Gizmodo that it could be a remnant of some random object in the Solar System that got sucked in by Jupiter’s gravity — such as a rogue comet, for example — which smashed into some of the retrograde moons, and broke them into the many that orbit the gas giant today.

Though that errant object no longer fully exists, the oddball moon could be a fragment of it. The team proposed the name Valetudo for this moon in the kooky orbit, after the Roman god Jupiter’s great-granddaughter, according to the release from the Carnegie Institution for Science.

“This just shows how chaotic our Solar System was in the past. These outer moons of Jupiter are remnants of chaos,” said Sheppard. He also added that Valetudo is bound to hit something again in the future and be ground to dust. “It’s like driving a car on the wrong side of the highway.”

The reason these moons are just being discovered now is because telescope technology has improved so much over the last decade or two, Sheppard told Gizmodo. Astronomers can take bigger, higher-resolution pictures and are less affected by glare and scattered light from planets.

“There’s been somewhat of a technology barrier,” Sheppard said. “Jupiter is a big planet, and there is a big area of sky around it to survey and find all of its various moons. Now, we can take four big pictures and see everything around it. But in the early 2000s, it was like looking through a straw.”

As telescopes continue to improve, Sheppard expects we’ll find even more moons orbiting Jupiter, since it’s so massive.

Alycia Weinberger, an astronomer also from the Carnegie who wasn’t involved in the new discovery, agrees with Sheppard.

“Just a few years after the first moons were discovered, people started finding many more all the time,” she told Gizmodo. “That suggests that there are more lurking there. As things get smaller they get harder to detect. I think we would be foolish to ever think we know everything.”

Additional moon discoveries could help reveal more about the history of Jupiter and other gas giants, because moons are often a window into how a planet formed.

Jupiter, for example, formed in a spinning disc of dust; gravity caused a bunch of mass to compact together and create various rocky and gaseous objects there, which eventually smashed together to create the gas giant we know today.

But some leftover junk from Jupiter’s birth that didn’t get sucked into the planet continued to orbit in the original direction of the disc, and what would be come the eventual spin direction of Jupiter. Those are prograde moons.

The team thinks that Jupiter’s retrograde moons, however, are mostly made up of a passerby objects from elsewhere in the Solar System that Jupiter vacuumed up and captured with its gravity.

Understanding moon-planet relationships like this one could be especially useful for studying other solar systems and exoplanets. Scientists discovered the first exomoon just last year.

“[Exoplanet moons] could potentially tell us how an exoplanet formed, and either how quiet or violent the planet-forming process was,” said Weinberger. “If certain collisions happen here, they happen in other systems.”

No matter the case, moons of any kind are worth paying attention to.

“This all folds into learning about how solar systems work, and how small bodies in solar systems buzz around,” principal investigator for NASA’s Juno spacecraft Scott Bolton, who was not involved in the discovery, told Gizmodo. “It’s always exciting to discover new moons or any bodies that are a part of our Solar System.”

 

 

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‘Robin Hood’ Gets New Trailer

Robin Hood hits theaters November 21.

 

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‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ Official Trailer

When you think of stadium bands, the type that created music perfect for large-scale performances, none should come to mind quicker than Queen. Bohemian Rhapsody is a dramatic retelling of the Queen story, with Rami Malek taking on the task of playing legendary frontman Freddie Mercury. Based on this official trailer, we’d say Malek looks like he was up for the challenge. The film tells the story of the bands rise to fame, but it also digs into Freddie Mercury’s personal life, his struggles and his Live Aid performance that would go down in the history books. The film hits theaters November 2.

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ZRC North Adventure watch

ZRC is a brand vintage dive watch collectors know well, they have been manufacturing quality timepieces since 1904. Their latest offering is the new ZRC North Adventure watch, an expedition watch capable of accompanying man to the most wild and remote places of the globe. The reliable and robust tool watch features a non-magnetic 316L stainless steel housing facilitating handling in cold weather, and a 4mm anti-reflective curved sapphire crystal with specific treatment to avoid the condensation created when the thermal amplitudes are high. The watch also features a date at three and the crystal has a round date-magnifier for easy reading in adverse conditions. The crown has also been enlarged to make it easier to use with gloves. The dive watch is waterproof up to 300 m, and promises great performances to explorers and adventurers of all kinds.  

 

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BOURBON BARREL ADIRONDACK CHAIR

Handbuilt by the craftsman at the Hungarian Workshop, the Bourbon Barrel Adirondack Chair gives the classic backyard lounger a Kentucky twist. Each piece is made completely out of reclaimed wooden casks from a Bluegrass distillery. The natural curve of the staves gives the seat and back a comfortable contour while the whiskey-aged patina provides a unique finish. Available with either an open or closed style top. $487 ETSY

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Overlord Trailer, Something Horrible Lurks In The Shadows Of World War II

We’ve been hearing for ages about Overlord, Bad Robot’s latest J.J. Abrams-connected movie about zombie-like creatures at the height of World War II, but now we finally have a look at its scare-filled take on what is already one of the deadliest conflicts in human history.

Directed by Julius Avery, Overlord follows a group of US paratroopers on the eve of the D-Day landings, as they find themselves behind occupied enemy lines attempting to liberate a small French village.

However, the squad quickly finds out that the Nazi forces stationed there have been experimenting in horrific projects to make a new breed of immortal soldiers in service of the Reich:

This trailer reminds me a lot of Call Of Duty Zombies mode but turned into a movie.

Overlord is set to hit cinemas October 25.

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BOEING 747 WHEEL TABLE BY PLANE INDUSTRIES

This Boeing 747 Wheel Table by Plane Industries is more or less exactly what it says on the tin – it’s an authentic Boeing 747 alloy wheel that’s been meticulously rebuilt into what is undeniably one of the greatest coffee tables money can buy.

Each wheel is sourced directly from the airline industry, wheels that have spent thousands of hours in service are selected, before having their two halves separated and chemically stripped.

Once the two halves of the alloy wheel have been taken back to bare metal they’re painstakingly polished for over 100 hours to a mirror finish. The inside of the table is powder-coated black, and a 40 inch piece of toughened and polished 8mm glass sits on top.

The completed coffee table measures in at 510mm high, by 610mm wide. The glass is 1100mm in diameter, and it weighs in at 70 kilograms.

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THE COMPLETE HISTORY OF 24 HOURS OF LE MANS

The epic, day-long race that winds through the little French hamlet in Northwest France is officially called 24 Hours of Le Mans (24 Heures du Mans in French), but those in the motoring world simply refer to it as “Le Mans.” Just as that great Tennis Championship in London is called simply “Wimbledon,” and the horse race at Churchill Downs is known only as “The Derby,” Le Mans is a name that needs no epithets nor honorifics to demonstrate its importance. It’s an event that is among the most hallowed in the world of sports. It has been called the most thrilling 24 hours in motor sports. It has been rendered cinematically in a legendary film with Steve McQueen, who was so enraptured by the race that he begged his producers to let him actually compete (they said no).

Le Mans has seen photo-finishes, terrible crashes, speed records broken again and again, and plenty of unbelievable vehicles. It has long been at the forefront of automotive pioneering and innovation issuing from major car companies, spurred on by a desire to beat their rivals out for the claim to the illustrious championship, and status as the most rugged, durable super car maker in the continent – if not the world. It is a deep, and rich history, full of innovation and brilliance, wild stories, sometimes catastrophic mishaps. To understand Le Mans is to understand the history of European – and eventually American – auto racing at large; to see how the tides shifted, trends started, and how companies rose and fell from prominence like spokes on a wheel. The History of Le Mans is fascinating, and too expansive to summarize simply – still we’ve taken the liberty of condensing it into a slightly quicker rundown, so that you can get the distillation of Europe’s greatest Endurance race. Warning: don’t blink. It goes fast.

THE TRACK

It begins with the Le Mans track, known as the Circuit de Sarthe. Named after the river that passes through the town of Le Mans, the track is comprised of private roads used exclusively for racing and in part public roads that are used for travel throughout the year. At 8.467 miles, the track is among the longest in the world. The track has undergone some modifications since the race began, but largely has remained the same.

The Circuit is divided into several sections. It starts with the Indianapolis, named for the famed American brickyard at the Indy Motor Speedway (in fact, the Indianapolis section of the Circuit de Sarthe refers to the presence of bricks under the tarmac), where the race begins. The Indianapolis leads into the Arnage, on to the Porsche Curves, added in 1972. Then, the Ford Chicanes, which were created in 1968 for pit safety reasons originating from the Le Mans disaster of 1955. Its effect is to slow cars down before the pit area is reached, to reduce the chance of crashes. The Dunlop bridge arches over the track as the Chicanes become the Tertre Rouge. The Rouge then becomes the Hunaudières straightaway, also the site where Wilbur Wright conducted some of the first tests of his flying machine. The Hunaudières is also called the Mulsanne Straight, as it leads directly to Mulsanne corner, and it’s down this straightaway where drivers get to rev their engines up the highest, and speed records are sometimes broken.

THE RULES OF THE RACE

There are two sets of rules for Le Mans; those pertaining to the cars, and those pertaining to drivers. The cars entered in the European Le Mans Series are designated in two categories, Prototypes and GTs. Those categories are further subdivided into the classifications of LMP1, LMP2 (Le Mans Prototype 2), LMP3 (Le Mans Prototype 3), then LM GTE (Grand Touring Endurance) and LMGTE AM. The LMP1 is the top class, referring to a racing closed car with no homologated production minimum required. As of 2020, Le Mans will comply with “Hypercar regulations” for all LMP1 cars, allowing cars to have more of a road-going appearance in order to reduce costs and encourage participation from more major auto manufacturers. The LMP 2 must weigh under 2,050 lbs. and be built to hold a passenger, among other regulations. The LMP3 category is designed for entry-level and beginning racers, while the LM GTE has specifications designed to ensure that the car is legitimately production based.

Le Mans uses its regulations to ensure driver and spectator safety, a major point of focus since a terrible crash took place in 1955. Experience in auto-racing is paramount. Drivers are ranked in level of experience from “Platinum” to “Bronze.” Drivers can only participate in the divisions to which their classification corresponds. The race used to have a standing start, in which drivers had to run to their cars from a standing position to begin the race, but that was eliminated in the late 1960s when it was deemed a safety hazard. The number of tire changes allowed are as follows per category: 48 in LMP1, 56 in LMP2, and 60 in LMGTE Pro and LMGTE AM.

THE HISTORY - From '23 To Today

The first Le Mans race was put on by the Automobile Club de l’Ouest in 1923. The race was a test of fortitude that sprung forth as a result of the French’s nationwide enthusiasm for automobiles. The 10.7 mile course was created in the streets of Le Mons, and called the Circuit de la Sarthe, for the river Sarthe.

The Le Mans remains the world’s oldest active endurance race. While it is commonly associated with Formula One racing, the Le Mans format is far different. In comparison, F1 races are short jaunts, mere sprints, while Le Mans 24 Hour Endurance Race is an ultra-marathon. As the third feature in the World Endurance Championship, Le Mans is the crucial race for most dogged, tenacious drivers in the world. A test of mental fortitude for racers, no doubt. But at the time of its creation, the Le Mans race was originally intended as a trial ground for automobiles to test their mechanical endurance.

In the early 1920s, Grand Prix motor racing was by far the most popular form of motor sport. The thrill of seeing cars defy standard beliefs about how fast a motorized vehicle could go, enraptured its spectators, and car manufacturers from all over the world participated. During the reign of GP racing, Le Mans sought to break the mold by introducing a new challenge. Rather than the rip-roaring, short burst cars that the proto-F1 Grand Prix-style races produced, the idea behind the endurance race was to see how well a company could manufacture a car that was both agile and athletic, while also being reliable, and incredibly hardwearing. A car that was built not simply for speed, but survival.

BEGINNINGS - 1923-1948

The first Le Mans race was put on by the Automobile Club de l’Ouest in 1923. The race was a test of fortitude that sprung forth as a result of the French’s nationwide enthusiasm for automobiles. The 10.7 mile course was created in the streets of Le Mons, and called the Circuit de la Sarthe, for the river Sarthe which flows through Le Mans. The race was held on 26 and 27 May 1923, not on a track, but through the public roads of Le Mans, France. The race was initially going to be a three-year cumulative effort, with the car that accumulated the best overall time in aggregate after three runs taking first place. However, that idea was soon scrapped.

The early races were dominated by the French in their home country, along with teams from the UK and Italian entering the mix. The winners of the first Le Mans 24 Hour Endurance race were Andre Lagache and Rene Leonard, who maneuvered the track in their 3 liter Chenard & Walcker, which traveled a total of 1,300 miles in the 24 hours of the race. In total, 66 drivers in 33 cars took on the course, and a remarkable 63 finished the 24 hour race. The race was held each year until 1936, in which general strikes in France caused its cancellation. The outbreak of WWII resulted in the race’s suspension in 1939, and the hiatus continued for a decade, until 1949.

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Women At Le Mans In 1935: The 1935 race at Le Mans was truly groundbreaking. Ten women participated in the race, a record that still stands to this day. It wasn’t the first time women had competed in the race; in 1930, Marguerite Mareuse and Odette Siko shared driving responsibilities of their Bugatti Type 40, and came in seventh place. Four years later, Siko came in fourth place overall – the best result for a woman in Le Mans History, a record which still stands. Many women have participated in the generally male-centric motorsports world since the ’30s, including Leena Gade, chief engineer of the Audi R18, who has won the Le Mans 24 Hour Race 3 times.

RETURN TO THE TRACK - 1949-1965

After the long hiatus following the second World War, Le Mans made a triumphant return, with more automobile companies participating than ever before. And more cars -for the first ever, Le Mans reached 100 entries to the race (though the ACO managed to trim the field by more than half). It was in the 1949 race that Ferrari claimed its first victory after years of falling short to its compatriot, Alfa Romeo. In 1953, the World Sportscar Championship circuit was formed, a series of races and endurance events in which Le Mans became a major event. As a result of the new level of competition between manufacturers, major brands like Ferrari, Aston Martin, Mercedes-Benz, and Jaguar started sending multiple cars to race in hopes of outdoing their rivals.

No longer was Le Mans a mere trial ground to test the durability of car models; it was a full blown sporting event, one of fierce competitiveness. As a result of the high tension, high stakes attitude with which the race had become imbued, there were more accidents, including the worst in motorsports history, which took place in 1955. One milestone achieved during this period was the first car to reach 300 kph, a Ferrari 330 LMB in 1963. The 330 LMB was part of a dynastic run by 1960 to 1965, in which Ferrari won six straight Le Mans races, officially establishing themselves as the premier race car manufacturer in Europe, if not the world.

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Ford Topples Ferrari In 1966: The 1966 Le Mans race marked a monumental achievement for American motorsports. Not only did an American company win the European endurance race for the first time, but they did it by knocking off Ferrari, the 6-time reigning champion, and shutting them out of the top three positions. The victory was at least partially driven by spite, after Enzo Ferrari had publicly embarrassed Henry Ford II by pulling out of a 1963 deal to sell the Italian company to the automotive giant.

Ford was out for vengeance, pouring $10 million into its Le Mans program, hoping to hit Ferrari where it hurts, it point of pride: auto racing. They did so in dominant style, thoroughly whipping Ferrari. Ford got its revenge. After 1973, Ferrari withdrew from competing in Le Mans completely to focus completely on Formula 1 racing, and didn’t return to the Circuit de Sarthe until two years ago. Some suggest that it was Ford’s complete destruction of the prancing horse in 1966, and subsequent years that made them throw in the towel.

 

THE GOLDEN ERA OF RACING - 1966-1980

The period from 1966 to 1980 is sometimes referred to as the Golden Era of Racing. The decade and a half saw a substantial amount of change for Le Mans – and the cars that participated in the race. The tide of European – namely, Ferrari – dominance turned in 1966, when Ford toppled the Italian goliath, usurping the Le Mans throne from the supercar maker with their legendary GT40. Ferrari had won the previous six races in a row. Not only did they not win the race, but they were shut out from the podium completely, with the three Ford Mk. II’s claiming gold, silver and bronze in the race (with the difference between first and second place just 8 meters). Ford went on to secure first place in the next four races, officially announcing the arrival of American engineering in the European racing circuit.

As the dynamics evolved, the cars became more dynamic. Speeds soared. Porsche 917 (the car that Steve McQueen drove in the 1971 blockbuster Le Mans) won two races in a row, and another two in the late ’70s. The rules changed – rather than a standing start, in which drivers had to run to get in their vehicles, the race now began in a rolling start at the Indianapolis section of the track. Famously, this rule change can be blamed on Jacky Ickx, who detested the having to rush into his car and take off (especially since the 1968 race, in which Ickx’s fellow Belgian Willy Mairesse was seriously injured as a result of the standing start policy, and was no longer able to race. Mairesse later killed himself). In protest, Ickx strolled nonchalantly to his car, put on his seatbelt, and began the race in last place. He won. The rule was changed the next year. Later on in the era, privateer constructors proved that you didn’t need a huge car manufacturer’s backing to win the race, as Jean Rondeau won the 1980 running of Le Mans in a car he created completely himself (a la Ricky Bobby) called the “Rondeau M379B.”

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The Le Mans Disaster of 1955: The worst tragedy in motorsports history took place at the 1955 running of Le Mans. Frenchman Pierre Levegh was driving for the Mercedes-Benz team. Before the race, Levegh had voiced his concern that the area near the pit-stop section and the grandstand was too narrow, and therefore dangerous.

Piloting the Mercedes-Benz 300 SLR, Levegh was trying to overtake racer Mike Hawthorn’s Jaguar in that region of the track when Levegh’s Mercedes bumped Lance Macklin’s Austin-Healey, sending Levegh and the SLR skyward. The car launched out of the track and into the stands, exploding and killing Levegh and 83 spectators. Mercedes-Benz called back the rest of their team after the accident, and didn’t participate for many years subsequently. The accident was a monumental turning point in terms of attitude regarding the safety of motorsports, and many new rules and regulations were instituted after this devastating tragedy.

 

FORGING (INTO) THE FUTURE - 1981 - 2000

For the 1980s, a new class called Group C was created, placing the emphasis on fuel efficiency. In a certain sense, this period marked a return to the race’s original purpose, as a playground for innovation. Car companies began straying from the diesel-guzzling, heavy duty race car bodies that marked their history, and began to move toward slimmer, lighter weight builds. Porsche largely dominated this category, eight of 10 races in the 1980s, and at one point six in a row. Jaguar returned to the track to wrest the title away from Porsche in ’88 and ’90, and Mercedes-Benz also made a comeback, participating in the Endurance race for the first time since the deadly wreck in 1955. In 1991, Mazda became the first Japanese manufacturer to win at Le Mans. Peugeot also entered the winner’s circle for the first time, taking the gold in 1992 and ’93 – and the record books, setting a new speed record by hitting 405 km/h, a record that many think will stand the test of time.

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400km/hr In 1988: The WM Peugeot was never built to win at Le Mans. The engineers at WM were not so much concerned with winning as they were with speed. In theory, speed will always be secondary to durability in an endurance race. But that’s not how WM thought. Before the 1988 race, team boss Gerard Welter definitively declared that his car would be the first to ever hit 400 km/hr at Le Mans. He wasn’t wrong. Driven by a turbocharged Peugeot engine, the WM had the power to do so, though it also had a tendency to break down under strain.

As previously mentioned, WM didn’t give a flying Ferrari about actually winning (or even finishing) the race. On the 3.7 mile straightway called the Mulsanne or Hunaudières Straight, the WM Peugeot achieved the glory it sought, proving Welter’s prophecy true. Driver Roger Dorchy hit 407km/h, setting a record that has yet to be broken. What did break, however, was The WM Peugeot – just 59 miles into the race. Still, their name is etched forever in the record books.

 

RACING INTO THE PRESENT - 2000 - Today

After a number of major auto manufacturers withdrew from the running of the Le Mans in the 1990s, leaving only Cadillac and Audi. From 2000 – 2010, Audi dominated the race, winning 8 of 10 races. At the beginning of the new millennium, the American Le Mans circuit began, and Audi destroyed the competition in those races, too. All told, throughout the decade Audi won nine American Le Mans Series championships between 2000 and 2008 and two World Endurance Championships. Audi continued its dominance in the 2010s, winning the first five of the decade, too. But since then, we have seen a slow return by many of the legacy car brands to the circuit. It has also seen a shift in fashion to electric cars with the last 6 victories going to hybrid cars. Porsche won in 2015, 2016 and 2017 with its Porsche 919 Hybrid, and last month, Toyota claimed victory for the first time with its TS050 Hybrid.

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Toyota Notches First Win In 2018: This year, Toyota claimed victory for the first time in 20 attempts. Toyota has previously entered 47 cars at Le Mans, finishing in the top 3 six times. After years of near misses, the Toyota team finally won the epic endurance race. Following Mazda in ’91, Toyota became the second Japanese car manufacturer to ever win at Le Mans. Their victory came one year after their 2017 entry broke down while in the lead and with just minutes left in the race. Though they may not have been opposed by Audi and Porsche (who both withdrew in 2018), their victory was still incredibly meaningful for a car manufacturer that had long sought to cement its name in racing history, and now has.

 

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Floyd Collins’ Ghostly Presence Haunts Mammoth Cave

As the tale of Floyd Collins, the man trapped for days in 1925, and the saga of the teens trapped in a Thai cave remind us, caves may be beautiful, but they’re also terrifying.

I was OK with Mammoth Cave until they turned the lights out.

After all, I was with a tour group. It was a National Park. Two park rangers were there as guides. The path we took was sidewalk smooth, there were guardrails (there are even restrooms inside Mammoth Cave). And there was plenty of light. Until there wasn’t.

When we’d been inside the cave a few minutes, one of the park rangers said she wanted us to see what the cave was like in its natural state and cut the power. The darkness that engulfed us was total. I’ve been in places so dark that I wanted to say I couldn’t see my hand in front of my face, but really, that’s just a figure of speech. I could always see something, some motion. But in Mammoth Cave, I did put my hand in front of my face and… nothing. I couldn’t see my hand. I couldn’t see motion. I couldn’t see anything.

I didn’t have time to become terrified. The lights came back on in less than 30 seconds. But that was more than time enough to become distinctly uncomfortable. Even when the power was restored, my first thought was, can we leave now?

Caves give me the creeps.

Don’t most of us feel this way? A week after I was in Mammoth Cave, 12 boys on a soccer team and their coach became trapped in a cave in Thailand, and the world was riveted until they were rescued. Yes, it was a terrific human interest story. But I think our fascination with the plight of those tweens and and teens went much deeper, connecting us with all those monkey-brain fears of darkness, entrapment, and being buried alive. It wasn’t just that those kids could be my kids. It was even more personal: That could be me.

I know, irrational, right? But what’s rational about caves? Womblike, tomblike, and irreducibly mysterious, they crop up in the mythologies of cultures around the globe. No amount of modernity can erase that power—in the less than 30 seconds that I spent in darkness, I could feel my thin veneer of civilization evaporate like dew.

No wonder America went crazy when Floyd Collins became fatally trapped in a Kentucky cave in 1925.

Like the story of the Thai boys, Collins’ plight mesmerized the public while rescuers tried to free him for more than two weeks. Thousands of people, as well as newspaper reporters and radio announcers, mobbed the site above the cave where he was pinned. Congressmen took breaks to rush from the floor of the House and Senate whenever there was an update. (The Collins story did not single handedly inspire the federal government to designate Mammoth Cave a national park a year later, but it surely hastened that decision).

Starting in childhood, Collins was obsessed with the caves that lay beneath his homeland in central Kentucky and, like many of his neighbors, even more obsessed with discovering new ones. Mammoth Cave, of course, was the end all and be all of caverns, having attracted tourists by the thousands since early in the 19th century. For decades, Mammoth’s success as a tourist draw spurred the locals to investigate every hole and crevice they could find in hopes of opening up a similar treasure house. Collins was one of the few successful searchers.

Illiterate and foolhardy to a fatal degree, Collins was nonetheless admired by his neighbors as a man with a deep understanding of caves and how they worked. He was one of the first people, for example, to correctly argue that the caves around Mammoth weren’t discrete caverns at all but part of one vast system—so it’s not any stretch at all to say that in fact Collins died in Mammoth Cave.

By all accounts, Collins’ biggest discovery, Crystal Cave, wasn’t huge, but it was beautiful. Much smaller than Mammoth and harder for tourists to reach, Crystal Cave did not make the Collins family much money. So Floyd persisted in his search. When he did find a promising crevice on a neighbor’s farm, he brokered a deal with the farmer to go halves on what he’d discover. And so, on a chilly Friday in late January 1925, the 37-year-old Collins crawled into what would be known as Sand Cave.

To call it a cave is generous. For the most part, it was a damp, slippery little tunnel—not even a tunnel, really, but more like a series of barely connected passageways through limestone rock and gravel. For most of its length, the passage curling down into the earth was smaller than an air-conditioning duct and a lot twistier, and much more dangerous.

When the one lamp he carried went out after several hours, Collins started back to the surface. He was wriggling through a particularly tight passage, his hands to his sides, when a rock fell on his left foot, pinning him. It wasn’t a huge rock. Shaped a little like a country ham and weighing less than 30 pounds, it was still big enough and heavy enough to hold him fast, chilled and wet and screaming for help in utter darkness..

It took almost 24 hours before he was found. And then all hell broke loose. Rescuers, some knowledgeable, some not, began pouring in. The attempts to extricate Collins lasted two weeks and ultimately involved family members, friends, state and local law officers, miners, stonecutters, college students, the National Guard, college professors, physicians, and reporters from all over the country, including William “Skeets” Miller, a 21-year-old reporter from the Louisville Courier-Journal who not only interviewed Floyd but tried as hard as anyone to free him (for his reportage, Miller would win the Pulitzer prize in 1926).

New York Daily News front page, Feb. 7, 1925.

Everyone had a different solution. A fireman’s hoist. An oxyacetylene torch to burn away the rock. Vaseline. A car jack. A shaft sunk straight down into the earth near the trapped man. None of it budged Collins so much as an inch, which only fueled the acrimony and arguing on the surface.

As the crowd grew around Sand Cave from dozens to hundreds to tens of thousands on Sunday, Feb. 8, they found themselves beguiled by pop-up stands peddling hamburgers, balloons, patent elixirs and tonics, and drinks hard and soft. A succession of stump preachers prayed for Collins’ soul. The curious parked for four miles along the road in any direction.

It was a media circus, too. Newspapers everywhere kept it on page one for at least two weeks. It was also national radio’s first major story and the first time that the entire country could stay abreast of a tragedy as it unfolded. (Collins’ story is considered one of the three biggest news stories in the U.S. between the wars, along with Charles Lindbergh’s solo flight across the Atlantic and the kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby—weirdly, among the airplane pilots who gathered to ferry news reports and film from the Collins rescue to the major city newspapers: an as yet unknown Charles Lindbergh).

After 5 days, two collapses left the cave tunnel impassable, cutting contact between Collins and the outside world. Until then, his rescuers were able to talk to him and bring him food and drink. Skeets Miller went down several times, interviewing Collins but also shredding the flesh off of his own hands trying to scoop the gravel away from Collins’ body. After the cave ins, the shaft was the only option, but the digging was slow going. By the time they got to him on Feb. 17, Collins was dead.

As Robert K. Murray and Roger W. Brucker put it in their definitive account, Trapped! The Story of Floyd Collins, media reports spellbound the nation because “Floyd’s plight touched in every person a fear of darkness and isolation, a primordial cave fear that stirred a feeling akin to nothing else in the human experience. Suddenly, millions of Americans were vicariously trapped alive with Collins…” (Brucker, a caver himself, has been down in Sand Cave six times and does not believe that Collins could have been rescued successfully even had things run more smoothly, given the cave’s terrifying instability.)

The nation’s obsession with Collins did not end with his death. His story has inspired songs (Vernon Dalhart’s 1926 version of “The Ballad of Floyd Collins” sold 3 million copies, making him sort of the Michael Jackson of his day), novels, movies, television productions, and, most recently, a Broadway musical. A century later, we are still fixated.

The whole time I was keeping up with the story about the soccer team trapped in Thailand, I kept thinking of Collins. The Thai rescue was obviously more successful and much better coordinated. But it wasn’t a lock. The death of one of the rescue divers inside the cave proved that caves are treacherous even when you know what you’re doing. And with the Collins story lodged in my head, I checked for news updates every morning with my heart in my throat. I, too, was “vicariously trapped.”

The Collins story was another reason I was ready to exit Mammoth Cave long before I got to the gift shop. Mammoth is mostly dry and full of big rooms and navigable channels. Tourists certainly never experience anything like the nightmarish squeeze that trapped Collins. And yet, at some level, a cave is a cave, and Mammoth’s complexity alone would make it terrifying to anyone who lacked a guide.

A map of Mammoth Cave looks like a) a plate of spaghetti; b) a cutaway of an ant farm; c) a subway system designed by a madman. The underground arteries run not only horizontally but vertically, and overlap and crisscross each other like piping in a multistory building. The world’s longest cave by far, Mammoth’s tunnels, passageways, and rooms extend underground for some 410 miles, and that’s just what’s been charted. No one knows for sure just how much bigger the cave system might be, although geologists think there could be another 600 miles of uncharted cave left to explore.

The Park Service urges visitors to think of Mammoth Cave not as a nether world separated from the bucolic landscape that lies above but as one giant ecosystem, and from a scientific perspective, that’s fair enough. But as soon as you step inside the cave, you realize that this is alien territory, well lit or not. The only thing it shares with other National Parks, the ones above ground, is awe inspiring immensity. But where places like the Grand Canyon and Yosemite lift your spirits as soon as you catch sight of them, Mammoth triggers emotions that are considerably more complex. Both treacherous and beautiful, it simultaneously attracts and repels. It is not a place to feel comfortable. It is a place to feel lonely, even in a crowd. It is literally the underworld, a fact frankly acknowledged by those 19th century explorers who dubbed its subterranean rivers names like Lethe and Styx. Like its sister parks aboveground, Mammoth makes you catch your breath, but it also haunts your dreams.

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Big Mysterious Sarcophagus Opened, Sucks

It’s been quite the month for Indiana Jones-inspired madness, after a sealed 2000-year-old sarcophagus was discovered in Alexandria, Egypt, on July 1. Nobody knew what was inside, but some feared that the black granite coffin might be cursed. Those fears were put to rest on Thursday, when the sarcophagus was finally opened. It was full of human bones and sewage.

More specifically, archaeologists from Egypt’s Ministry of Antiquities found three male skeletons in a reddish-brown slop. The ministry believes the men interred there may have been warriors since one of the skulls showed signs of an injury caused by an arrow. The sludge, they think, leaked into the sarcophagus from a nearby sewage trough.

There were no immediate signs of a curse, although maybe it was just the smell.

To internet sleuths, learning the true contents of the mysterious sarcophagus must be a bit of a disappointment.

Since it had been undisturbed for thousands of years, many believed that the burial site held some sort of curse, and opening it could release apocalypse scenario, such as that depicted in The Mummy Returns, a 2001 thriller starring Brendan Frasier and Rachel Weisz.

After all, a grotesque-looking alabaster sculpture of a man’s head was also found near the tomb.

Some even thought that the sarcophagus might contain the body of Alexander the Great, whose grave has never been found.

But the sarcophagus contained none of those things. There was no curse, no apocalyptic scenario, no Alexander the Great. There were just a bunch of human bones soaking in sewage.

Nevertheless, the skeletons will be sent to the National Museum of Alexandria to be studied. The Ministry of Antiquities will also lift the sarcophagus from the ground and move it to Egypt’s Military Museum.

As for the internet-based archaeology enthusiasts who have missed another chance to witness some sort of world-changing spiritual invasion or, more enticingly, the discovery of an ancient Egyptian artefact that proves to be a portal to a parallel world in another galaxy, as seen in the 1994 sci-fi classic Stargate — well, those folks will have to wait until the next mysterious artefact to come along.

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Creepshow Is Being Resurrected On TV Thanks To The Walking Dead's Greg Nicotero

The nostalgia revival train keeps on chugging. This time it’s George A. Romero and Stephen King’s ‘80s anthology Creepshow. It’s being turned into a television show this time, and it has the perfect creator attached.

In a release from horror streaming service Shudder (owned by AMC) today, Greg Nicotero said, “Creepshow is a project very close to my heart! It is one of those titles that embraces the true spirit of horror… thrills and chills celebrated in one of its truest art forms, the comic book come to life! I’m honored to continue the tradition in the ‘spirit’ in which it was created.”

Each episode of the anthology series will have a different director.

Nicotero, who visited the set of the original film back in the day, will be taking on a lot for the new series, serving as director and executive producer, as well as supervising the show’s “creative elements”.

He’s of course a master make-up effects artist, having worked on Romero’s Day of the Dead back in 1985 and going on to have an incredibly extensive career in the industry. His work on The Walking Dead and Fear the Walking Dead was probably also a great “job interview” for this new gig.

The original Creepshow went on to spawn two sequels as well as a comic series illustrated by Bernie Wrightson. The new series will premiere in the US on Shudder in 2019, and while no other creators or actors have been announced, they promise to fulfil the original film’s tagline “The Most Fun You’ll Ever Have Being Scared”. An Australian broadcaster has not yet been announced.

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BULLEIT BOURBON TATTOO LIMITED EDITION SERIES

Bulleit Bourbon has always bottled their expertly distilled and aged, distinctly spicy spirit with the same design, until now. Their latest Frontier Works collaboration project is the Bulleit Bourbon Tattoo Edition series, which will feature the work of four radical tattoo artists on their signature frontier-style bottles.

The Bulleit Bourbon bottle already has a badass, classic design, but the work of four talented tattoo artists, Shawn Barber of Los Angeles, Jess Mascetti of New York, Thomas Hooper of Austin and Jason Kundell of Portland, make the bottles collectible pieces of art once the last drop goes down the hatch. To make things even more interesting, each bottle has a scannable QR code that showcases an augmented reality experience to digitally bring each design to life. Bulleit gave each tattoo artist plenty of freedom to express the love for their respective city through their art, and the results are amazing. These inked up Bulleit Bourbon bottles will be available in each artist’s respective state, starting in August, and select bottles will be up for grabs across the U.S.

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The Large Hadron Collider Accelerated 'Atoms' With Electrons For The First Time

You can feasibly put anything inside the world’s largest physics experiment, CERN’s Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland, so long as it can be vaporised. You could even stick a sandwich in there. But for the first time, scientists have accelerated an atomic nucleus with electrons still attached.

The Large Hadron Collider’s goal, in short, is to bestow subatomic particles with energies otherwise unachievable on Earth, hoping to uncover the fundamental nature of the universe. The LHC typically accelerates protons, the positive pieces of atomic nuclei, or entire atomic nuclei.

Usually those nuclei have been stripped of their negatively charged electrons, but in this case, a beam of lead “atoms” — technically they’re ions — travelled through the accelerator with at least one electron attached. The physicists hope to one day use these accelerated atoms in a next-generation experiment.

“We’re investigating new ideas of how we could broaden the present CERN research programme and infrastructure,” LHC engineer Michaela Schaumann said in a press release. “Finding out what’s possible is the first step.”

The LHC typically starts with neutral lead atoms or a bottle of hydrogen gas, which travel through a chain of smaller particle accelerators. Oscillating magnetic fields strip many of the electrons from the lead atoms. But the atoms lose their remaining electrons when they pass through a metal foil before entering the 27km-round ring.

Schaumann and her team adjusted the width of the foil so that one electron remained attached to the lead atom. The scientists then adjusted the LHC to maintain the beam of particles with one more electron than the lead ions in the experiment usually have.

The researchers were able to keep the beam circulating in the Large Hadron Collider for two hours, according to the release.

Aside for being a first, the experiment is a proof-of-concept for a proposal that could potentially turn the LHC into a gamma ray factory. If realised, the LHC would produce the highest-energy manmade light ever.

This light could be turned into secondary beams for all sorts of research purposes, including the study of dark matter. It “could open new research opportunities in a vast domain of uncharted fundamental physics and industrial application territories,” according to the proposal.

Such a gamma ray factory would involve hitting one of these single-electron atom beams with a laser, causing the electron to hop up to a higher atomic energy level. The electron would then fall back to its ground state, releasing a light particle. But since the atom is already travelling at near light-speed, the light particle’s wavelength would be squeezed, greatly increasing its energy.

At least one CERN accelerator physicist who wasn’t present for this study, John Jowett, told Gizmodo he was impressed by Schaumann’s work and thought it was an exciting event. As this was just a first test, Schaumann now hopes to run the beam at a higher intensity.

Scientists at the LHC are often trying new things — last year, they accelerated xenon atoms instead of the usual lead. The experiment is also receiving an upgrade that will let physicists gather more data faster. It will take many more experiments like these to unravel the mysteries of particle physics.

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In The New Venom Trailer, Eddie Brock Meets The Beast Within 

The new trailer for the Sony film delves a little more into the actual basic premise, something mostly absent from our earlier glimpses of the film.

Eddie Brock (Tom Hardy with an accent that continues to perplex) is a journalist who uncovers a very shady experiment with alien species that, in turns, leads to him becoming connected with a symbiotic being that transforms him into the violent super-powered anti-hero Venom.

There’s a lot of good Venom-y action here — even some tantalising shots of Riz Ahmed’s villain in action as the other symbiote of the film, Riot — as well as lot of interesting displays of just how Venom will deal with its dual protagonists, given that they occupy the same body and a lot of Hardy just talking to himself is bound to get old at some point.

And it’s also darkly funny at times, both from Hardy’s own reactions as Eddie, gets further caught up in the symbiote’s violence, or even the symbiote itself, who relishes in giving some... graphic threats.

Venom rolls into cinemas October 4.

[MIKA27]

NANOLEAF LIGHT MUSIC PANELS

Ambiance is everything, so if you want to chill and vibe out to some tunes, it’s a better experience when the lighting is stellar. Nanoleaf Light Panels will give your home, office or bar that neon cool Bladerunner feel that will get you in a relaxed state of mind.

These smart light panels will illuminate your life and rev your creativity, starting with how you decide to piece together the triangular panels on the wall. From there, you can customize your lighting with the easy-to-use app by creating scenes and setting schedules, which you can share with the user community. You can even activate the scenes using your voice via Siri, Alexa or Google Assistant and feel like you’re in a Sci-Fi flick. Not only that, but it has advanced technology that turns music into light with its rhythm module that reacts to music across all genres. There are three sets to choose from, based on how many panels you need, and they’re all available right now.

 

[MIKA27]

UFO CABIN IN BRUNECK, ITALY

When a cabin is tucked away in the mountains somewhere beautiful, it generally doesn’t need to be all that special from an architectural standpoint, as the location itself tends to set the pace. But that doesn’t mean it can’t be made all the more desirable by a unique structure, as is the case with the UFO House in Bruneck, Italy.

Just south of the Austrian border, this mountain hideaway is actually 45-years-old, having originally been built in 1973, courtesy of late-architect Josef Lackner. Problem is, after its initial construction, it was left and forgotten. That is, until Stefan Hitthaler took it upon himself to renovate the interesting building. Now the flying saucer-esque home is a singularly unique living space with an interior symmetry mimicking that of the outside. And it also boasts a number of modern conveniences, like heated floors, more windows to let in natural light, LED lighting, and more. It even has a draw-bridge style entrance – further cementing the spaceship inspiration of the original structure.

[MIKA27]

HOTEL HERMAN K IN COPENHAGEN, DENMARK

While destination is certainly at the top of the list when it comes to travel, accommodations shouldn’t be too far behind. After all, where you sleep is a pretty big part of any trip. And if you’re headed to Denmark and staying in the capital of Copenhagen – a beautiful European destination if there ever was one – then you should at least consider staying at the stunning Hotel Herman K.

Formerly an electrical transformer station operating for the last half-century, the building’s industrial facade is largely unchanged – looking a bit like something you might find in Gotham City. And that extends to the inside too, with exposed concrete walls, generous slabs of white marble, and one of the most gorgeous hotel bars we’ve ever seen. Of course, if you ever want to get some fresh air, some of the more premium rooms also have rooftop patios that will allow you to take in the sights and sounds of the surrounding city. Prices per night start at $570.

 

[MIKA27]

VELOMACCHI SPEEDWAY HYBRID TRAVEL DUFFLE

Velomacchi makes gear for the modern era – meaning incredibly rugged, flexible, and built for travel. In today’s fast paced world, everyone needs a capable bag. Velomacchi provides more than capability, supplying the modern day roamer with the ultimate travel companion in their Speedway Hybrid Duffel Bag.

At Velomacchi, quality is paramount. After all, the company’s two headquarters are located in Mt Hood and Mt Adams. Thus, they strive for the kind of durability that highly active people need, creating bags and gear for those who are constantly seeking the next challenge to surmount. Their latest, the Speedway Hybrid Travel Duffle, is a 50 L bag that refuses to fail. The watertight and highly versatile bag is a backpack that can be converted into a duffle. With such features as the quality easy close zipper, a tuck-away travel harness, ballistic quilted back panel and a water-tight main compartment, the Speedway Hybrid will be comfortable throughout your journey, and keep your belongings from being damaged. Crafted from 1000D competition fabric, the Speedway Hybrid is fully waterproof, abrasion resistant, and stable for high speeds – in case you decide to strap this pack to your motorcycle and speed off into the unknown.

 

[MIKA27]

STRAPO ULTRA THIN MINIMALIST WALLET

If you’re like us, it’s agreeable that the time has come to cut down on the excess when it comes to everyday carry. Meaning, no more bulky wallets, oversized pocket knives, or any unnecessary pocket items to weigh you down. It’s also for this very reason, that Strapo’s leather wallet caught my eye.

Purposed as an idealistic minimalist wallet, each Strapo ultra-thin wallet is built from genuine top-grain leather and features an expandable strap the securely holds anything from keys to receipts to cash for your enjoyment. Additionally, on top of easy-to-access storage for more than 10 cards, you’ll enjoy a separate easy-access slot for a preferred card of choice. RFID- blocking tech also keeps any and all finances safe, and its ultra-thin design ensures that George Constanza wallet never invades the privacy of your pockets again. Available now is several sleek colorways. $36.00

[MIKA27]

How the Rum-Soaked Royal Navy Sobered Up

It’s been nearly 50 years since British sailors stopped getting a daily ration of liquor.

Last Sunday marked the 46th anniversary of Black Tot Day. On July 31, 1970, the British Royal Navy ended a centuries-old hallowed tradition: the issuing a daily dram of liquor to sailors aboard its ships. When the day arrived, sailors around the world gathered for a final tot, and the remnants of the barrels were ceremoniously dumped into the ocean.

Afterward, the navy’s rum budget was diverted into providing other sort of entertainment for sailors. This included bus excursions, golf outings, and equipment for discotheques.

On second thought, perhaps we should drink a double tot.

Military forces were once, essentially, alcohol-powered fighting machines. The Dutch navy provided gin to its sailors. The French (naturally) got wine. The American Continental Navy, established to fight in the War of Independence, included in its charter the issue of a half pint of rum daily to every man, with more doled out for extra duty and during military engagement.

But the British navy had the most rococo, highly evolved, and well-documented history of drinking on the high seas.

The daily tot likely started for a simple reason. Water in the casks would often develop algae and taste putrid and sour. And beer (also rationed for centuries) didn’t hold up well in humid heat; captain’s letters often referred to the beer on board as “stinking.”

Higher proof spirits, however, retained their bright, sweet flavor far longer (even improving in the barrel), and as such were much in demand by seamen living on a diet of bland porridge and salted meat. Liquor rations may not have kept men hydrated, but at least it offered an oasis of tastiness.

More importantly, of course, alcohol offered a respite from the tedium of shipboard life. In their quarters below decks, men were stacked like cordwood in hammocks in airless spaces, living literal inches away from fellow sailors possessed of uncertain hygiene and almost-certain gastro-intestinal distress. Naturally, the high point of any day was hearing the piper call sailors above decks to receive their daily allotment of spirits. “Good liquor to sailors is preferable to clothing,” noted Woodes Rogers, an English privateer and later governor of the Bahamas, in 1712.

But what liquor? Seamen were rationed fortified wines and brandy when in the waters of Europe and Africa. When the British navy turned its sights to West Indies and North America, “naval rum” became an essential staple. By 1740, writes James Pack in his detailed 1982 history of the spirit, “the rum issue, as the daily alternative to beer, was common practice on the West Indies station.”

Naturally, sailors tended to quaff their daily pint-sized ration all at once. This led to predictable problems. Traversing lines high in the rigging was difficult enough when sober. And even greater problems arose when in port. Drunken sailors got into fights and were killed, and were more easily shanghaied or recruited aboard other ships when potted and staggering about.

Famous and revered Admiral Sir Edward Vernon oversaw ships in the West Indies for decades. He thus saw the effects of rum first hand. It was responsible for “stupefying [his sailors’s] rational qualities,” he wrote, resulting in “fatal effects to their moral as well as their health.”

In August 1740, he issued an edict that contained two sweeping changes to the rum rations. First, it was to be disbursed twice daily, thereby discouraging wholesale guzzling. More significantly, he called for it to be significantly watered down: one part of rum to four parts water.

Sailors called the new drink “grog.” Grogram was a type of gum-coated cloth that shed rain nicely and was supposedly favored by Vernon. His men had nicknamed him “Old Grogram,” and so a shortened version of the name made the leap to drink, where it has endured to this day.

The diluted grog ration was formally incorporated into the naval regulations in 1756, which was followed by a gradual, 260-year history of further watering down. The ration was cut in half in 1823, and then halved again in 1850.

Over the next century, the interest among seaman in partaking of the tot started to fall off; by the 1950s, only a third of navy sailors lined up for it. Then came the Breathalyzer. A meddlesome British newspaper used one to demonstrate that a sailor could still be legal drunk after consuming his ration.

The House of Commons then took up the debate, and eventually decided that what you do with a drunken sailor is not give him control of nuclear weapons and high-tech electronics. A lump sum of several million dollars was paid into the Sailor’s Fund to compensate for the loss of rum, which went to pay for the disco balls and whatnot.

On July 31, 1970, British navy personnel around the globe donned black armbands to mark the lamentable day. Mock funerals were staged. A British guided-missile destroyer tied up at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii was the nearest British ship to the international date line, so it was the last to do away with the tot.

Crewmen assembled on deck of the HMS Fife, tossed back their final dram, then tossed glasses into the harbor followed by a barrel.

And a centuries-old tradition came to an end. But in doing so, it gave birth to another tradition.

So ration yourself a tot (neat, no ice, a blend of Jamaican, Guyanese, and lighter rums), and salute the sacrifice of sailors everywhere.

[MIKA27]

Sharks Are Creeping Into the U.S Northeast Because of Climate Change

Warmer waters are pushing the animals further north into previously shark-free waters. Should you be worried?

Shark Week, Discovery Channel’s annual homage to the ocean’s most infamous predator, comes to a close this weekend.

But residents of northeastern states like New York—long considered a relatively shark-free zone—might not have to wait until July 2019 to see more, as global warming has been linked with a significant northern shift in the habitats of most marine animals, including most sharks.

“There’s an astounding mass migration of animal life towards the poles,” Malin Pinsky, an associate professor in Rutgers’ Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Natural Resources, told The Daily Beast. In his work with spiny dogfish, a thin, small shark that lives along most of the East Coast, he’s seen their habitat shift “quite substantially.”  

Pinsky isn’t the only scientist to make this observation. In April, researchers in North Carolina published a paper in Nature’s Scientific Resources that documented the northern migration of bull shark nurseries.

By analyzing data from North Carolina’s Division of Marine Fisheries (NCDMF), the researchers found that between 2003 and 2011, when water temperatures in the sound were hovering closer to 22 degrees Celsius, only six juvenile sharks were caught in the area. But as temperatures began to rise, a group of bull sharks migrated from their previous home in Northern Florida and established a nursery in Pamlico, causing a drastic uptick in juvenile shark presence. Between 2011 and 2016 alone, NCDMF found 53.   

“You hardly ever saw neonates [infant sharks] in the catch record up until 2011,” Roger Rulifson, a biology professor at East Carolina University and one of the authors of the study, told The Daily Beast. “And in 2011, something changed and we started seeing them every year, and in increasing numbers.” Prior to this change, the northernmost documented nursery was in Indian Lagoon, Florida—approximately 400 miles south of Pamlico.

“It seems more so than any instinctive, biological clock kind of process—they’re responding to how hot or cold the water is, ” said Charles Bangley, a postdoctoral research fellow at the Smithsonian’s Fish and Invertebrate Ecology Lab who also worked on the study. And it’s not just sharks: The study points out that this trend of northward migration “has been observed in hundreds of marine taxa.”

Stephen Kajiura, a professor of Biological Sciences at Florida Atlantic University, observed a similar phenomenon in blacktip sharks. Beginning in 2011, Kajiura and his team flew a small, video camera-equipped plane 500 feet over the ocean’s surface biweekly between Boca Raton and Jupiter, Florida (about 75 kilometers, or 47 miles), and counted the number of blacktips—a species that typically summered in the Carolinas and returned to Southern Florida in the winter—in the resulting videos.

His results, published in the journal PLOS One in 2016, showed that shark presence in Southern Florida was “inversely correlated with water temperature.” That is, the warmer the water was, the fewer sharks returned so far south. When water temperatures rose above 25 degrees Celsius, he discovered, there weren’t any groups of large sharks in the area. If temperatures dropped the following year, however, they returned. The North Carolina researchers found something similar for cold water: when Pamlico Sound temperatures dropped below 22 degrees Celsius, they didn’t see any large groups of bull sharks.

While these two factors were correlated, it doesn’t necessarily mean that increased water temperature caused northward shark migration. Instead, Kajiura wrote, the sharks could also be “following their food,” which would be subject to the same temperature-based pressures.

In the years that followed this study and as Florida’s waters have warmed, Kajiura has also found that most sharks have stopped traveling all the way south. In 2018, as water temperatures averaged about 24 degrees Celsius, he saw less than 3,000—compared to more than 12,000 in 2011, when temperatures averaged closer to 23.

But why are marine animals so sensitive to changes in water temperature, even if it’s just a single degree Celsius? Pinsky explains that it’s because they’re ectotherms, which means that they’re unable to regulate their internal temperature and instead must depend on their external environment to do so. Not all fish nor all sharks are ectotherms, he noted: some, like the Mako or the Great White Shark, can increase their body temperature internally.   

But those that can’t are extremely picky about the temperature of their external environment. When ocean water is too warm, shark heart rates and metabolisms spike, increasing their oxygen needs. “There isn’t all that much oxygen in seawater, and the fish can’t get the oxygen they need,” Pinsky said. When the water is too cold, on the other hand, “they don’t move as fast, they’re not as efficient predators, and they can’t get the food that they need.”

The ideal temperature varies species by species. Pinsky’s spiny dogfish prefers water between five and 17 degrees Celsius; Kajiura’s blacktips do best between 21 and 25.

No matter the species, the sharks have one thing in common: When global warming strikes, their habitats can drastically change.  

And that means new species of sharks are moving into unusual territory like the Northeast region in greater numbers—especially into areas where humans don’t expect them. On July 20, officials confirmed that a 13-year-old boy was bitten by a shark on the shore of Long Island, marking what is likely New York’s first shark attack in 70 years—and only about the tenth in the state’s history.

But scientists have repeatedly emphasized that shark attacks aren’t the only consequences of the northern migration, and that fears of increasing shark attacks are largely overblown.

In fact, shark attacks are actually one of our most minor problems: As The Daily Beast noted in a previous article about President Trump's antagonistic relationship with the creatures, “You’re more likely to die from heart disease, a car accident, or even from being struck by lightning” than you are from a shark attack. On average, only six people worldwide are killed by shark attacks each year. Just last year in 2017, no shark-related fatalities occurred in the United States.

The northward migration could, however, pose a bigger threat to marine ecosystems. Referencing his ecosystem in southern Florida, Kajiura noted that “This ecosystem has been operating for millions of years, with sharks coming down on a regular basis. If you no longer have this influx of these upper-level predators sweeping in [...]  you could have an explosion of these mid-level or lower-level fish, because there’s no big ones coming in to eat them, like there were previously. There could be cascading effects on multiple trophic levels.”

Kajiura said these top-level predators could hypothetically be replaced by other sharks moving north to escape their own warming habitat. But he cautioned that there was no guarantee that these events would happen simultaneously.

He also expressed concern for the northeast’s fisheries. “If you had a fishery for striper on Long Island, and you suddenly have these blacktips showing up eating all your stripers, you could have an economic impact for the fishermen.” Rulifson agreed, adding that some fishermen in North Carolina have had their gillnets ripped apart by the new bull sharks, and that the nets are quite expensive to replace.

But for Bangley, the worst thing about northern migration isn’t the risk of potential ecological or economic damage, or even the risk of a shark bite. “They’re actually fairly cute at the size we’re catching them,” he said.

Instead, it’s the major environmental changes that might be causing it. “The sharks are really kind of an indicator species of the bigger ecological changes that are happening as ocean temperatures increase,” he said. “The scarier aspect of this is just the sign of the larger environmental change that’s going on.”  

[MIKA27]

Ikepod Is Coming Back with a New Line of Watches

In case you weren’t paying attention, cult-classic brand Ikepodis coming back later this year without one of their key investors and a new direction focused on bringing you the best watch possible.

With two different models slated for production–a “Duopod” stainless watch with a 42mm case and chronograph “Chronopod” watch with 44mm stainless case complete with 24-hour indicator in addition to the chrono functions–this is an upcoming brand that you’re already familiar with that also has a whole lot of things to love. Whether you’re into the Horizon or Hemipode models the brand has released previously, these new iterations have something for every watch collector to love regardless of how much you’re willing to spend and what you’re looking for in a watch.

Regardless of whether you’re looking for a watch for the office or everyday wear, you’ll find something to complete the collection with the new line of Ikepod watches.