site: copy edit — 2 pieces tightened, 3 cross-piece inconsistencies resolved

This commit is contained in:
2026-08-01 02:08:59 -04:00
parent bcccab5230
commit a9af7a2448
7 changed files with 26 additions and 7 deletions
@@ -2,7 +2,7 @@
title: "The smallest, the largest and the emptiest"
date: 2026-08-01
tags: [daily-finds, travel-and-places, outdoors-and-nature]
description: "Three superlatives you can walk up to: England's smallest active parish church, California's largest recorded lodgepole pine, and eighteen kilometres of almost empty beach."
description: "Three superlatives you can walk up to: England's smallest active parish church, California's largest recorded lodgepole pine, and eleven-to-eighteen kilometres of almost empty beach."
blurb: "Three records, all of them visitable, none of them behind a rope."
items:
- saint-olafs-church-wasdale-head
@@ -1,6 +1,6 @@
---
name: "The Archimedes Palimpsest"
subtitle: "A prayer book written across the only surviving Greek copy of three Archimedes works"
subtitle: "A prayer book written across the only known copies of two lost Archimedes works"
date: 2026-08-01
shortlist: true
promotedTo: "archimedes-palimpsest"
@@ -1,6 +1,6 @@
---
name: "Champion Lodgepole Pine"
subtitle: "A 110-foot pine that germinated fifty years before Plymouth Rock"
subtitle: "A 110-foot pine that germinated sixty years before Plymouth Rock"
date: 2026-08-01
link: "https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/champion-lodgepole-pine"
linkText: "atlasobscura.com"
@@ -11,4 +11,4 @@ tags: [playing-cards, public-domain, giftable, printing]
description: "A $20 deck built from the public-domain Steamboat Willie characters, with fully holographic foil backs in an embossed castle-grey tuck of English handmade paper."
---
Steamboat Willie entered the public domain in 2024, and this is one of the more charming things anyone has done with it: a twenty-dollar deck whose court cards are the 1928 mice and their shipmates. The backs are holographic foil end to end. The castle-grey tuck is handmade English paper, embossed, and takes the pressing differently every time — so the box is slightly different deck to deck, which a printed one never is.
Steamboat Willie entered the public domain in 2024, and this twenty-dollar deck puts the 1928 mice and their shipmates on the court cards. The backs are holographic foil end to end. The castle-grey tuck is handmade English paper, embossed, and takes the pressing differently every time — so the box is slightly different deck to deck, which a printed one never is.
@@ -19,11 +19,11 @@ import hero from './hero.png';
> Two cartographers cannot independently invent the same fake town — which is why one of them planted Agloe on a map, and why the story of what happened next is only about half verifiable.
The logic of the copyright trap is airtight and rather beautiful. Two mapmakers surveying the same county will draw the same rivers and the same roads, so a shared feature proves nothing. But a settlement that never existed can only get onto a rival's map one way. Around 1925, Otto G. Lindberg and his assistant Ernest Alpers of the General Drafting Company — who made the road maps distributed by Esso — put a dot at an empty junction in the Catskills and labelled it Agloe: their own initials, O.G.L. and E.A., shuffled.
The logic of the copyright trap is airtight. Two mapmakers surveying the same county will draw the same rivers and the same roads, so a shared feature proves nothing. But a settlement that never existed can only get onto a rival's map one way. Around 1925, Otto G. Lindberg and his assistant Ernest Alpers of the General Drafting Company — who made the road maps distributed by Esso — put a dot at an empty junction in the Catskills and labelled it Agloe: their own initials, O.G.L. and E.A., shuffled.
Then the trap sprang the wrong way. In 1930 a company called Agloe Lodge Farms was incorporated, acquired a fishing lodge nearby and named it the Agloe Lodge. A thing invented so that it could be proven not to exist had acquired a business address.
Here the record thins, and it is worth being straight about where. The version that circulates — that Rand McNally later printed Agloe, that General Drafting sued, and that Rand McNally won by pointing at the Agloe General Store as proof the place was real — is a very good story that the documentation does not carry. Wikipedia's account, sourced to the cartographer Frank Brown, has Rand McNally answering that its information came from **Delaware County records**, which was enough to head off action. Local residents dispute that a general store ever stood there at all. Several links in the popular chain are marked as uncited.
Here the record thins, and it is worth being straight about where. The version that circulates — that Rand McNally later printed Agloe, that General Drafting sued, and that Rand McNally won by pointing at the Agloe General Store as proof the place was real — is a good story that the documentation does not carry. Wikipedia's account, sourced to the cartographer Frank Brown, has Rand McNally answering that its information came from **Delaware County records**, which was enough to head off action. Local residents dispute that a general store ever stood there at all. Several links in the popular chain are marked as uncited.
That leaves the durable part, which is strange enough without embellishment. A dot placed to catch a thief attracted a business that took its name from the dot. The name then propagated through county records and later through digital maps, and Agloe kept appearing and disappearing from Google Maps decades after anyone had a reason to draw it. Nothing was ever built to make Agloe real. It simply got referred to enough times.
@@ -1,6 +1,6 @@
---
name: "The Archimedes Palimpsest"
subtitle: "A prayer book written across the only surviving Greek copy of three Archimedes works"
subtitle: "A prayer book written across the only known copies of two lost Archimedes works"
date: 2026-08-01
category: history
topics: [history-and-archives, learning-and-reference]