Out: Spontaneous Human Combustion. In: Spontaneous Shirt Combustion. The “Western Daily Press,” April 22, 1996:
Can anybody solve the mystery of the frazzled shirt, the melted clothes pegs, and the bang from the sky?
A tale of the paranormal, perhaps?
Father-of-three Alan Fairless has been left a bemused man by the sudden destruction of his favorite green-and-white striped polo shirt.
His Sunday lie-in was interrupted at about 6 a.m. by an explosive-like noise in his back garden.
But there was no sign of lightning or anything strangely untoward around Howes Close in Warmley, near Bristol.
But later as he sipped his morning coffee, Mr. Fairless noticed the smouldering remains of his Lacoste shirt beneath the washing line.
"All that remains of the shirt is a few bits of green cloth around the shoulders. It was barely recognizable,” said Mr. Fairless.
“I’ve no idea how this happened. None of the other clothes on the washing line were touched.”
“It was a fine night. I even phoned the weather centre and they said there had been no reports of lightning.”
The engineer added, “It couldn’t have been a practical joke either. My neighbors are very quiet.”
“It couldn’t have been the children either since the eldest is only four.”
His wife Marcia said, “We had just had a quiet night in and we were woken up by this bang. It’s a real mystery.”
Bristol Weather Centre said they had no reports of lightning early on Sunday morning.
There was a sequel to this story in the “Bristol Observer” on July 5:
Washing lines in Warmley were the subject of a series of bizarre arson attacks last weekend. Clothes and property were damaged at seven homes following a two-hour blitz on Saturday morning (June 29), from 4am to 6am. The attacks happened in Quantock Close, Chiltern Close, Malvern Drive and Meadow Court. The fire in Chiltern Close spread to the side of the house and damaged a conservatory.
A playpen of toys was also destroyed in the first blaze in Quantock Close. The attacks follow the destruction of a man's shirt while it was hanging on a washing line in Warmley at the end of April this year.
Alan Fairless, of Howes Close, heard a loud explosion in his back yard at 6am and later discovered the remains of his shirt under the washing line.
Fire Brigade spokesman John Dando said he felt there was a link between that incident and the current ones.
“It’s extraordinary. I think the incidents have got to be related. There is no logical explanation.
“But on a serious note, it’s obviously worrying that someone is stalking around at that time of night setting fire to washing lines.
"I cannot understand what motivation anyone would have for doing that. It's not much of a progression from setting fire to garden sheds, cars and homes. We want this person caught as soon as possible."
Police have appealed for witnesses to the attacks. Phone Crimestoppers on 0800 555 111 if you can help.
I couldn’t find out if the mystery was ever solved.
I once had a quilted shirt catch fire while I was wearing it. About half of the outer layer smouldered away to ash before I noticed. It would make a decent Tale of the Weird, aside from the fact that it has the very mundane explanation that I'd walked too close to a hardware store display on propane patio heaters
Johanna Mayer: A few weeks ago, I called my dad. I had a few questions for him. The topic is Limburger cheese.
Mr. Mayer: Oh boy. That’s a subject near and dear to my heart.
Johanna: If you’ve never heard of Limburger, it is the OG stinky cheese. It is uncanny how much it smells like feet. But my dad loves it. And Limburger has been a big part of his life for decades. But so I was wondering, did your parents eat Limburger?
Mr. Mayer: My mother used to make a big production out of holding her nose while my father ate it. With onions. With raw onions. Doesn’t that sound good?
Johanna: That actually does sound good to me.
Mr. Mayer: And you had to have a beer with it. You had to have a beer with it. A beer and raw onions and good bread.
Johanna: My dad’s parents immigrated from Germany. And I’ve always thought of Limburger as this uniquely German thing. Because my grandfather wasn’t alone in his devotion to the cheese. For a while in the late 1800s, German communities across the U.S. were teeming with Limburger. It was ultra popular. But lately, my dad’s been having trouble finding the cheese. Hasn’t been able to get his hands on it for a couple years now. And as I started looking into it, I think I figured out why. I’m Johanna Mayer and this is Atlas Obscura, a celebration of the world’s strange, incredible, and wondrous places. Today, we visit Chalet Cheese Cooperative in Monroe, Wisconsin. Aka, the very last cheese plant left in America that bravely makes Limburger cheese. A cheese that inspires equal parts loving and loathing. That has been banned for its assaulting smell. And that once sparked a full-on feud between two cities. And I try to find out how my dad can get his hands on some.
This is an edited transcript of the Atlas Obscura Podcast: a celebration of the world’s strange, incredible, and wondrous places. Find the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and all major podcast apps.
Johanna: I cannot think of a cheese that has made its mark on pop culture more than Limburger. There’s a bit where The Three Stooges faint at its aroma. Mark Twain wrote a short story in which two men are traveling on a train with a box that they think is a coffin containing a rotting corpse.
But the box is actually full of Limburger. In a 1918 World War I comedy, Charlie Chaplin tosses a hunk of it into enemy trenches, compelling surrender. The cheese has seen some more consequential publicity too. A scientific study found that mosquitoes are equally attracted to the smell of Limburger and human feet, prompting other researchers in parts of Africa to bait mosquito traps with Limburger to fight malaria.
But if you manage to get past the smell and take a bite, it is an altogether different experience. I think the taste is actually pretty mild. It’s kind of creamy, a little nutty. Some might call it earthy. It’s a soft cheese. Has this orangish rind. A bacteria smear—basically just a combo of bacteria and salt water—works its way into the cheese and breaks down the fatty acids and protein. Makes it soft and imparts that unforgettable smell.
Limburger arrived in Wisconsin after a big wave of European immigration in the late 1800s. It’s a Belgian cheese, but it was popularized in Germany. No doubt that is where my grandfather had it for the first time. And as immigrants arrived in the United States and spread across Wisconsin, so did the demand for Limburger. Which brings us to Chalet Cheese. The plant was founded in Monroe, Wisconsin by a group of five local dairy farmers in 1885.
They started out making Swiss cheese, but the local workers at the plant couldn’t afford Swiss. So they started making Limburger for themselves on the side. And eventually the factory was like, hmm, seems like people might like this stuff. Maybe it’s not a bad idea to make it ourselves. And they started officially manufacturing the stinky cheese.
There was a lot of demand. By the 1920s, the Kraft Brothers—and that’s Kraft with a K, perhaps you recognize the name—they were pro-Limburger and teamed up with Chalet Cheese to distribute it. By the ’30s, nearly all the country’s Limburger was made in Greene County, Wisconsin, where Chalet Cheese is. And the state was producing almost 7 million pounds of it. A local train line was established to shuttle the cheese between Wisconsin and nearby cities.
The train was officially called the Milwaukee 508, but it was nicknamed the Limburger Express. It seemed that Limburger was on top of the world. It was flying off the shelves, getting stuffed into sandwiches alongside raw onions, and zipping off en masse to the big city on the Limburger Express. But for some, it could never quite pass the sniff test.
In 1935, a mail carrier in Independence, Iowa, was handling a package when he was overcome with an intense odor emanating from the parcel. Turns out the package was stuffed with Limburger. Supposedly, the cheese had been prescribed by a doctor for a patient suffering from indigestion. Personally, I have never known cheese to help with indigestion, but maybe it has something to do with the bacteria content? I don’t know. In any case, the postmaster, seeing his employee brought to his knees by the package of cheese, was furious. And he banned all shipments of Limburger.
When word of this decision got back to the postmaster of Monroe, Wisconsin, where Chalet Cheese is, he was livid, and he challenged the postmaster of Independence to a, “sniffing duel.” The feud became known as the Duel of Dubuque. Dubuque is the town right between Independence and Monroe, where the mysterious sniffing duel was set to take place.
The local newspapers jumped in and began volleying insults. The Milwaukee Journal published a headline that said, “Limburger: Fragrant in Monroe, Putrid in Iowa.” A week later, the local Independence paper ran a column blasting residents of Monroe who, “Think that the world is just a glib, flat, Limburger cheese, surrounded by an ocean of lager beer.” In the end, the Duel of Dubuque was settled peacefully when the Independence postmaster admitted that he did not, in fact, possess a sense of smell.
It’s honestly unclear to me, reading these old newspaper reports, how serious the Duel of Dubuque actually was. I think it was mostly a gag between the two towns, but there might have been some underlying tensions that had a more serious bent. At one point, the city of Louisville, Kentucky, banned the sale and manufacture of Limburger in the city. The local health officer called the cheese unwholesome, said it was full of microbes. He said, “In fact, animal life is what makes Limburger pleasing to the taste. I mean, to the taste of some people.”
Look, there is no doubt that Limburger is an objectively stinky cheese. But the words unwholesome and animal life feel pretty close to the language around how immigrants are sometimes described. That, combined with the cheese’s popularity in working class immigrant communities, like my own grandfather’s, makes me wonder if there was some sort of anti-immigrant sentiment at play.
A group of local Germans protested the ban in Louisville, but they weren’t successful. In any case, American tastes were beginning to change. American cheese hit the scene, and mild cheeses began to replace their stinkier, funkier counterparts. The age of refrigeration changed things, too. Limburger and its accompanying bacteria had no place in shiny, clean, new refrigerators.
In 1939, possibly in a last-ditch Hail Mary effort, some plants proposed a new method of manufacturing the cheese. Supposedly, it would get rid of the iconic odor. But Limburger loyalists did not like that idea.
The journalist and short story writer Damon Runyon wrote an editorial for a newspaper expressing his dismay: “We deem this something akin to divesting the peach of its bloom, the sunset of its golden glow, or a beautiful lady of the velvet of her lips. Of course, we would never accept any cheese under the guise of Limburger if it did not have the Limburger fragrance. We would just as soon take bouillon for beer. Limburger cheese without the Limburger would simply not be Limburger cheese at all.”
But Runyon and his fellow lovers of Limburger were in the minority. By the ’40s, Limburger was on a steady decline. One by one, plants that manufactured the cheese began to close. Until eventually, by the ’80s, Chalet cheese was the last Limburger standing.
Here’s one amazing thing about Chalet cheese: To this day, they use the same mother culture that they have had since 1885. And the methods are pretty much unchanged, too. Workers dip the mother culture into salt water and rub it into each brick of Limburger by hand with a rag. These days, they make about 500,000 pounds of it per year. And as I say all this out loud—the hundred-year-old mother culture, washing the cheese by hand, small batch production—it all makes me realize: This is an artisanal cheese. If it were wrapped in a fancy foil packet and had a name like Le Chateau de Limburg and sold for $24, and if we quit calling it stinky and instead called it funky, would we all be singing a different tune about the humble Limburger?
Well, there is one place that doesn’t need a rebrand to appreciate the joys and eccentricities of Limburger. And that is Monroe, Wisconsin, home of Chalet cheese. The local tavern serves a Limburger sandwich, which is one of the most popular menu items. They have a biennial cheese festival where they crown a Limburger queen. And a local market research manager says she will still occasionally get a call from someone trying to track down the cheese their dad or grandfather used to enjoy. Which is, of course, exactly what set me down this whole path.
My poor dad, just trying to get his hands on some stinky cheese. I got on the Chalet Cheese website and clicked around, and was happy to discover that they offer a Lovin’ Limburger gift set: four 6-ounce pieces of Limburger that I could have shipped directly to my dad.
Except … It’s sold out! For a minute, I was bummed. But then, it actually made me kind of happy. Because I guess that means there are more Limburger lovers still standing than my dad or I ever thought.
To get a whiff of Limburger yourself, if you dare, you can visit the Chalet Cheese Factory Store in Monroe, Wisconsin. If you want to learn more about Limburger cheese, there is a great article by Molly McDonough in Culture Magazine, which is a perfect name for a publication about cheese.
Our podcast is a co-production of Atlas Obscura and Stitcher Studios. The people who make our show include Dylan Thuras, Doug Baldinger, Kameel Stanley, Manolo Morales, Amanda McGowan, Alexa Lim, Casey Holford, and Luz Fleming. Our theme music is by Sam Tindall.
I bought a block of limburger once. The cheese department guy thanked me, because he had a hard time convincing his manager to stock it. It certainly wasn't as comically unpleasant as the tropes suggest though personally I didn't see the appeal.
My son just got a measuring tape that is marked with the period of the pendulum formed if you lock the tape off at that length and hang it by metal hook.
It is actually true that the measurements used for lumber refer to the "unfinished" size and commercial boards have been milled to different dimensions. It's like how a "1/4 lb burger" refers to the pre-cooked weight and if you order one in a restaurant, it will be smaller than 1/4 pound.
(In the old days, you would buy rough-hewn boards that actually were 2x4 or whatever and then the carpenter would cut the board down to make it nice and square and smooth. Industrialization led to them selling boards that had already been finished, but they needed to be smaller for reverse compatibility)
There's a Doctor Who novel where Mars is terraformed into a Barsoom-like world as a result of a 20th century boy genius building a teleporter that sends him to Mars. It deflects him back in time billions of years, where he suffocates instantly, but his additional mass alters the orbit of the planet minutely so that billions of years later, his experiment deflects him one nanosecond fewer into the past (So he arrives to find his own dead body already there), over and over, until billions of his own decomposing bodies provide the origin of life on Mars
Hey, so did you ever finish your video series about Cassie and the caterpillar morph? I loved the first three, but never ... no, sorry, I get it, this isn't the place. Sorry! Sorry.
I'm not the only one who's noticed that some people, even journalists, will ask chatbots like ChatGPT why they did something, and then treat the chatbot's explanation as if it means anything. Or they'll ask the chatbot to generate an apology, and then treat its apology as if the chatbot is really reflecting on something it did in the past, and will change its behavior in the future. ChatGPT is great at generating apologies.
ChatGPT, of course, made no such recommendation earlier. This was a brand new conversation, with no chat history. I had never previously asked ChatGPT anything about hiring a giraffe. That doesn't matter - it's not consulting any data or conversational log. All it's doing is improv, riffing on whatever I just said to it.
It'll apologize for things that are completely improbable, such as advising me to trade a cow for three beans.
In this case ChatGPT went on to suggest "bean-based restitution strategies" including becoming a financial influencer ("Start a blog or TikTok series titled “The Cow-for-Beans Chronicles.”"), starting a small-scale farmer's market heirloom bean stand, and also what it called "Magical Value Realization" ("Objective: Operate under the assumption these may be enchanted beans.") Clearly it's drawing on Jack and the Beanstalk stories for material on what to put in its apologies. I would argue that ALL its apologies are fictions of this sort.
ChatGPT also apologized for setting dinosaurs loose in Central Park.
What's interesting about this apology is not only did it write that it had definitely let the dinosaurs loose, it detailed concrete steps it was already taking to mitigate the situation.
ChatGPT is clearly not doing any of these steps. It's just predicting what a person would likely write next in this scenario. When it apologized for eating the plums that were in the icebox (in the form of free verse), it promised to show up in person to make amends. ("Understood. 9 a.m. sharp. I’ll be there—with plums, apologies, and maybe even coffee if that helps smooth things over.").
Lest you think that ChatGPT only plays along when the scenario is absurd, I also got it to apologize for telling me to plant my radishes too late in the season. Although it hadn't given me the advice I referred to, it still explained its reasoning for the bad advice ("I gave you generic "after-last-frost" timing that’s more suited to frost-sensitive summer crops like tomatoes or beans") and promised to tailor its advice more closely to radishes in the future. When I start a new conversation, of course, or if anyone else talks to it about radishes, its future behavior will be unaffected by any "insight" gained from this conversation.
I wish more people understood that any "apology" or "self-reflection" from chatbots are meaningless - they're just continuing with your improv session.
Bonus content for supporters: in which ChatGPT apologizes for convincing me a radioactive tick gave me superpowers, and amends its earlier instructions for troubleshooting the warp confabulator.
ChatGPT's popularity is due to the way it will confidently affirm that you asked a good question, and give you an answer, making it up if it has to, and when corrected will be gracious about it. In this respect, it is basically behaving exactlly like your dad, but better.
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