Boom: warm blue pool!
Indignity Vol. 5, No. 128
LOST & FOUND DEP'T.
Museum Built on Top of Fossil
Recently Found in America
A four-meter-wide sunken pool of milky light-blue warm water (in previously featureless ground of the Porcelain Basin of the Norris Geyser Basin in Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming, where the 109-degree pond was apparently created by a series of low-grade hydrothermal explosions)
A previously unknown strain of orthoreovirus (in a dead Everglades short-tailed shrew killed and retrieved by Pepper, a black domestic shorthair cat owned by a virologist in Gainesville, Florida, after Pepper had earlier killed a cotton mouse that carried a strain of jelongvirus)
An 1844 portrait of Dr. John Beale Davidge, the founder of the University of Maryland School of Medicine (in a closet at the now-closed Bertha's Mussels restaurant in Baltimore, when it was being cleaned out for a foreclosure auction)
A teddy bear covered in latex made to look like stitched-together human skin (outside a convenience store in Victorville, California, where it was mistaken for human remains)
A fossilized vertebra that appears to be the remains of an ornithopod dinosaur from 67.5 million years ago (retrieved from 763 feet below a parking lot of the Denver Museum of Science and Nature in City Park in Denver, in a 2 1/2 inch wide core sample produced by exploratory drilling for the museum's possible geothermal energy conversion)
Wreckage presumed to be that of the L.W. Crane, a wooden side-wheel steamship that burned and sank in 1880 (on sonar scans of the bottom of the Fox River in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, by researchers looking for the wreckage of the Berlin City, a steamship that burned and sank in 1870)
A Colt M4 rifle and 5 30-round clips (in a hardshell case on the street in Lennox, California, by a passerby, after a Los Angeles County deputy sheriff reported having lost the weapon)
Recently Missing in America
A standard blue United States Postal Service mail box (from the side of the street in Montgomery, Alabama)
Somewhere between 40 and 50 American flags (from a "patriotic display" on Glenwood Avenue in Boardman Township, Ohio, set out by a man who told police it is his habit to "place American flags throughout the township annually" to mark July 4)
A trailer full of skateboarding ramps and other equipment for pop-up skating events (from a residential street in Raleigh, North Carolina)
Eighty koi (from a "decorative pond" outside a restaurant in Yucaipa, California, out of an original 85 fish reportedly taken by two men with buckets)
High-value Pokemon cards valued at between $110,000 and $130,000 (from a shop in Bedford, Massachusetts, in a late-night burglary)
A two-seat spring bouncer in the shape of a fire truck (from a playground at Kohler Andrae State Park in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, where its base springs were left behind)
A handgun and $2,000 in cash (from vehicles on the parking lot of Our Lady of Lourdes Catholic Church in Raleigh, North Carolina, in a series of smash-and-grab robberies)
WEATHER REVIEWS
Bethany Beach, Delaware, to Wilmington, Delaware, to Bethany Beach, July 15, 2025, July 15, 2025
★★ Puddles were scattered around and water lay beaded on the cars. There were breaks in the clouds above the highway and blue seemed to be unhurriedly asserting control over the day. But a few miles on were brownish stormy-looking clouds, as if the Toyota had caught up with the overnight showers on their retreat. Mist clung to the stretch of coast on the descent from the first bridge; colors took over from shapes in the confusion of the tilted receding middle distance. More mist lay on bright green fields further along. Then came stretches of sun that could have passed for a full clear day, and dark clouds hanging low, and once enough drizzle to justify a pass of the wipers. None of it made any coherent progress or pattern. On the way back out of Wilmington, a cloud like a brick of wool arose in front of the car and then rode along to the left for a while. Another cloud, which looked like any number of different, previous dark clouds along the way, let a burst of actual light rain fall. The Indian River Inlet was a Mediterranean blue under the bridge. Back at the rented house, no sooner had the beach things been hung up in the yard than the sky turned dark and they had to be hustled inside again before the downpour arrived, pencil-thick, with thunder. A leak in a bend of the downspout sent a jet of water arcing out over the deck. Afterward there were new deep, mirrored puddles filling the streets and the parking lots and even the lawns, with grass poking up out of them.
EASY LISTENING DEP'T.
THE INDIGNITY MORNING Podcast is on vacation! Here is the Indignity Morning Podcast archive!
TOM SCOCCA
ADVICE DEP'T.
HEY! DO YOU like advice columns? They don't happen unless you send in some letters! Surely you have something you want to justify to yourself, or to the world at large. Now is the perfect time to share it with everyone else through The Sophist, the columnist who is not here to correct you, but to tell you why you're right. Direct your questions to The Sophist, at indignity@indignity.net, and get the answers you want.
SANDWICH RECIPES DEP'T.
WE PRESENT INSTRUCTIONS in aid of the assembly of a sandwich selected from Encyclopedia of Cookery; 1001 Recipes, Menus & Rules for Modern, Scientific and Economic Cookery (Vol. 4), by Eugene Christian and Molly Griswold Christian, published by the Corrective Eating Society in 1920, and available at archive.org for the delectation of all.
EGG AND OLIVE SANDWICH
3 ripe olives
Mayonnaise dressing
1 hard-boiled egg
Pimentoes
Chop the egg fine then mince the olives and pimento. Mix all with dressing and spread between slices of bread which have been buttered.
If you decide to prepare and attempt to enjoy a sandwich inspired by this offering, be sure to send a picture to indignity@indignity.net .
SELF-SERVING SELF-PROMOTION DEP'T.
Indignity is presented on Ghost. Indignity recommends Ghost for your Modern Publishing needs. Indignity gets a slice if you do this successfully!
