Rat kings, squirrel kings - and their relation to a Christmas tradition

"Rat kings are cryptozoological phenomena said to arise when a number of rats become intertwined at their tails, which become stuck together with blood, dirt, and excrement. The animals consequently grow together while joined at the tails, which are often broken. The phenomenon is particularly associated with Germany, where the majority of instances have been reported...

Most researchers presume the creatures are legendary and that all supposed physical evidence is hoaxed, such as mummified groups of dead rats with their tails tied together. Reports of living specimens remain unsubstantiated…

Specimens of purported rat kings are kept in some museums. The museum Mauritianum in Altenburg (Thuringia) shows the largest well-known mummified "rat king", which was found in 1828 in a miller's fireplace at Buchheim [above]. It consists of 32 rats. Alcohol-preserved rat kings are shown in museums in Hamburg, Hamelin, Göttingen, and Stuttgart. A rat king found in 1930 in New Zealand, displayed in the Otago Museum in Dunedin, was composed of immature Rattus rattus whose tails were entangled by horse hair.

The term rat king has often led to the misconception of a king of rats... The Nutcracker, by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, adapts a tale by E. T. A. Hoffmann that features a seven-headed Mouse King as the villain..."

Image and text from Wikipedia. Credit to Neatorama.

Addendum #1:  Reposted to add this example of a "squirrel king" -

The Animal Clinic of Regina in Saskatchewan, Canada, got a surprise this week when a city worker brought in six squirrels fused together by their tails...

This particular group of six were nesting near a pine tree and sap fused their tails together. A city of Regina worker found the young squirrels and brought them to the clinic. The animals were sedated and the veterinarian team worked to untangle the mess of tails. Their tails were then shaved of the matted fur and they were given antibiotics to prevent infection.  (Via Nothing to do with Arbroath)

Addendum #2:  Reposted in order to add this related interesting phenomenon found by my wife at the Buck Manager website:

[T]hese three white-tailed bucks were found locked during the rut. The bucks were located on a ranch in east-central Texas and, from the information that I received, one of the bucks was still alive when the trio was found. Apparently, the antlers were cut from the dead deer and one very tired buck was lucky enough to run back off into the woods.

There are lots of comments at the site, some opining that the event was faked and arguing the method of death, and one who reported seeing a buck attack a pair that was already locked.   My wife found another example at the same website:

 "...there is nothing worse than finding a dead buck that you did not shoot, but how would you feel if you found not one, but three dead bucks on your property? Okay, it gets worse. What if those three bucks totaled 450 inches of antler? That is exactly what a hunter in the mid-West found on his Ohio farm..."

"They had the bank of this creek all tore up."

Addendum #3: And reader Lisa knew of a ancient example of the phenomenon involving Ice Age mammoths.

Addendum #4:  Reposted from 2013 to add this image found by an anonymous reader -

- of a squirrel king in Nebraska, with the victims, as in the example cited above, fused at their tails by pine tree sap.

Addendum #5:  Reposted yet again to add this "squirrel king" found locally here in central Wisconsin:

Their tails had become entwined with "long-stemmed grasses and strips of plastic their mother used as nest material," the Wildlife Rehabilitation Center wrote on Facebook... "It was impossible to tell whose tail was whose, and we were increasingly concerned because all of them had suffered from varying degrees of tissue damage to their tails caused by circulatory impairment," the post read.

See also: A squirrel king, which has this explanatory note -

In the wild, squirrels make their nests of dried leaves and branches...  A strange natural accident that sometimes occurs is sap from pine branches that the nest is constructed of can adhere to the squirrels' tails and ultimately to each other's tails. Squirrels normally have litters of 4 to 6 babies. As they are fed in the nest, they are quite "squirmy" and move around frequently. Once their tails become stuck together, movement is limited amongst them and they jump under and over each other trying to reposition themselves. In the process, they literally knot or braid themselves together. The squirrels pull in many directions, thereby worsening the situation. They can actually live quite a long time like this, as the mother continues to feed them.

Reposted yet again, to add some information from a Longread article "All Hail the Rat King" -

The Thuringian town of Altenburg houses perhaps the most spectacular exemplar. A mad bramble of no fewer than 32 rats sits mounted on a plexiglass pane in the entrance hall of the Mauritianum, the town’s small natural history museum. It was found in a village not too far away, in a warm space underneath a chimney...

The first visual representation of a rat king is in Johannes Sambucus’s Emblemata, from 1564, a collection of moral truths “wrapped up in certain figures.” Sambucus introduced the rat king as both natural phenomenon and symbol, and a sense that its sheer bizarreness has something to tell us has never gone away...

Some have considered the joke to be literal: as old as the discovery of rat kings is the suspicion that they cannot possibly be real. “We present it as a natural phenomenon,” says one of the curators in Strasbourg. “If someone made it a sport to tie rat tails together, it would be a major effort, unless you have steel mesh gloves.” The rat king is just as inexplicable when you think it’s a fake as it is when you assume it’s authentic...

One element that stays mysteriously stable across the centuries is rat kings’ geographic spread: the history of the rat king is uncannily, at times uncomfortably entwined with the history of Germany. Rattus rattus exists across the globe: it spread across Europe and North Africa with the Romans, then across the rest of the globe with European colonizers. And yet rat kings come from a curiously limited area. All but one of the specimens preserved today are from Western and Central Europe. Marten t’ Hart notes that “from 1564 to 1963, fifty-seven rat kings were discovered and described.” The vast majority of those discoveries took place in areas that make up present-day Germany.  This curious geographic concentration has led some researchers to suggest that rat kings are cultural, rather than natural phenomena. More bluntly put, they could be elaborate, centuries-old hoaxes...

In 1816, two years before Arndt published “Rat King Birlibi,” E.T.A. Hoffmann wrote Nutcracker and Mouseking, which inspired (via Alexandre Dumas père) Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s inescapable ballet.

If you watch The Nutcracker today, the mouse king has gone missing several times over. He has disappeared from the title, only shows up in one of the acts as the leader of an evil army of mice, and goes through a busy and less-than-iconic mass scene before exiting the stage as Masha explores the Land of Sweets with her nutcracker-cum-prince. But Hoffmann’s rendition not only lavishes a great deal of attention on the army of mice and their vicious battle with the nutcracker’s tin soldiers, but also makes it clear that the mouse king is a close relative of the rat king. This is how we first meet the monarch:

Seven mouse heads with seven shiny crowns rose, hissing and whistling dreadfully, rose out of the ground. Soon after the mouse body to which these seven heads were attached emerged fully, and three times the entire army squeaked in triumph at the great mouse garlanded with seven diadems…

So, just in time for Christmas - a new way to interpret the "Nutcracker." My next step was to search Google Images for Rat Kings in the Nutcracker.  Most of them are benign and cuddly.  At NPR I found Maurice Sendak's version -

- which has a certain menace to it, but this one at Deviant Art was the best:

Your choice how much of this to share with your impressionable children before taking the family to a Nutcracker performance at your local school or concert hall.

Merry Christmas to all !!

Reposted from 2019 to add this image of "rat king dumplings" -

- which you can read about in John Farrier's post at Neatorama.

"Clinker brick" illustrated

The image above was submitted to the blackmagicfuckery subreddit by someone wondering why one brick in a sidewalk was not covered with the dusting of snow.  After dozens of inane replies ("Australian brick" "installed upside down, snow is on bottom") one knowledgeable Redditor provided the proper information:

This could be a brick called a 'clinker'

Clinkers are bricks that have different properties than normal bricks. They are used as decoration, paving and for water proofing buildings.

In the old days they fired bricks in a big kiln. All stacked on top of each other. They found that the bricks at the bottom experienced higher temperatures for longer. Turning them into a denser brick, closer to ceramic, that had a metallic "clink" sound when tapped with a hammer or another brick.

For a time these clinkers were not wanted because they have a high thermal conductivity, meaning they transport heat and cold into/out of your house better, that's bad. Then someone figured out they make great road pavers. Being harder than normal bricks they take longer to wear out.

Some people used them as building decorations because they are usually a darker colour than normal bricks. And some people realised that they are waterproof and started using them as the outside layer in double brick buildings. With increased demand they started to purposefully make clinkers for decoration, waterproofing and road paving.

Looks like magic, but it's just science.  You learn something every day.

Seeking help from my readers

Lots of stories this week about Olympic skater Alysa Liu, including a feature article in The Atlantic on "The Alysa Liu Effect."  The article focuses on her hairstyle ("raccoon head") and clothing, but didn't mention her teeth (photo cropped from a source somewhere else).

This old guy wonders what's going on here, because these look like dental implants rather then stick-on ornaments.  I'm quite aware that children getting braces can now have their braces painted, or can use colored rubber bands, as a cosmetic compensation for what is otherwise perceived by their schoolmates as unattractive (similar to "pimple patches" I suppose).  

So is this a new body modification that will become more common?  Do the arrows represent something from comics or a meme I haven't seen?  I'm turning to my readership for answers because it will be faster than looking this up.  Thanks in advance.

(Well, that didn't take long.  A dozen replies within an hour.  Thanks again.)

Question answered.  Comments now closed.

The "Agartha" meme ("Himmler's favorite myth")

As reported in The Atlantic: 

Heinrich Himmler and other Third Reich occultists in the 1930s latched onto the strange idea that the Aryan race was not the product of evolution but descended from semidivine beings who left the heavens and established a secret civilization on Earth, possibly beneath Central Asia. Himmler, the head of the SS, was so enthralled by the possibility of what he considered celestial proof of the superiority of the white race that he provided funding for an SS expedition to Tibet in 1938 in the hope of locating his utopia, according to Black Sun, a 2001 history of Nazi occultism by the British historian Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke.

Almost a century later, this idea of a lost Aryan civilization, called Agartha, has caught on again, this time with teenagers posting memes online. If you’re older than 25, you likely missed it. But over the past year, memes about Agartha—a mystical, underground city in the center of the Earth full of flaxen-haired, blue-eyed people—kept going viral and have become a staple of the youth internet...

Agartha memes usually feature supercuts—a video of short clips—comprising UFOs in the Antarctic, pyramid-laden civilizations, digitally altered images of Charlie Kirk with blond hair and chiseled features, stereotypical Nordic-looking people, and sugar-free Monster Energy drinks in white cans... But all of the Agartha memes share in common the concept of the subterranean Aryan paradise that Himmler yearned for...

Agartha was first developed as a mythical fantasy by French writers in the late 1800s but had no far-right associations at the time. After Himmler co-opted Agartha, neo-Nazis carried it and other Third Reich racist myths into the postwar era by creating a new philosophy and value system called “esoteric Hitlerism,” a fusion of racialist ideology and wacky mysticism. In the early 2020s, white supremacists turned those myths into internet propaganda...

Sellner positioned the memes as something that could be taken in jest. “Irony is the glue that holds this whole meme-universe together. Anyone who takes things deadly seriously or gets triggered has lost,” he wrote. This is the tone that a lot of people online have taken regarding the Agartha memes. No matter the underlying content, you’re not supposed to take the joke seriously, and if you do, the joke’s on you.

It’s a well-worn tactic, but also a common excuse used to launder noxious content. It’s not ironic or satirical for ethno-nationalists to joke about a mythical ethno-state when that fantasy is reflective of their extreme beliefs.

Editorial note:  the word is AgaRtha, with an "R", not Agatha (and there is a Wikipedia entry with lots of info).

Why some colonial Americans were born in "1722/3"

A letter to the editor in the August 2025 issue of American Philatelist magazine commented on a previous article about how the changeover from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar can result in some confusion for researchers, then offered this (to me) surprising observation:

"There is one other important difference that was not mentioned.  During colonial times in America, New Year's Day was legally celebrated on March 25, not January 1, though many celebrated in January.  This was also true in Great Britain and the rest of the British Empire.  This was an additional change in 1752, not noted in the article, when Great Britain adopted the Gregorian calendar.

For those who research cemeteries for genealogy, you'll often see a date engraved on a grave marker such as 1722/3, reflecting this, for a date between January 1 and March 25."

I found additional information here: 

"Since ancient times, England had used the “Julian calendar”, instituted by Julius Caesar in 45 BCE.  The Julian calendar followed a solar year of 365 days, but had a somewhat inaccurate method of calculating leap years, which over the centuries led to the addition of too many extra days.  Originally, January 1 was the date of the new year in the Julian calendar, but after the fall of the Roman Empire, the date gradually changed in various parts of Europe to March 25, to conform with Christian festival of the Annunciation.  England adopted March 25th as New Year’s day in the twelfth century.

"Between 1582 and 1752, not only were there two calendars in use in Europe, but there were even two different starts of the year in England.  The official start of the year was March 25, but many people celebrated January 1 as the “New Year’s Day”, following the continental example, and January 1 was often cited as such in almanacs. Therefore, a system of “double dating” was often used in English and colonial records.  For dates falling between the new “New Year” (January 1) and the old “New Year” (March 25), the year could be denoted as two years separated by a slash.  For example, “March 18, 1642/43”.   In the absence of double dating or other evidence, one may not know to which year a document is referring, according to modern reckoning."

I have not located any photos of American colonial gravestones displaying the split date; if anyone knows of such, please leave a comment. 

Addendum:  A grateful tip of my blogging hat to an anonymous reader who found a video that discusses similar unusual gravestones in an English cemetery (from whence the embedded screencap at the top).

Arm of man who fell off a bicycle

Note that not only are the radius and ulna broken, but the metal plates inside the bones (from repair of previous fractures) are bent at a 90 degree angle.  The victim explains:

Was on a nice leisurely bike ride - shoe laces got stuck on my bike pedal and wrapped around multiple times over. Fell off as I was braking to get them unstuck. I never want to get on a bike again 😫

Embedded image cropped for size and emphasis from the original at Reddit, via Neatorama, where the appropriate advice is offered: "Always double tie your shoes before riding a bike, and tuck the ends into the shoe."

Holes in the pillars of this bridge

I saw this image in the WhatIsIt subreddit, where readers were asked to provide an explanation for their intended function.   I thought perhaps they were for stringing communication etc cables across the river  and was delighted to read this postulated explanation, which rendered the image blogworthy:

"To plant explosives. In some countries bridges are designed to be easily blown up in case of war. Don't know if this is the case."

It wasn't long before the true explanation was provided, which I'll put "below the fold" so you can ponder for a moment...

"Of Oz The Wizard"

This appears to be a full-length video of the original Wizard of Oz movie rearranged alphabetically according to spoken dialogue (and credits).  It's probably TL;DW but is surprisingy engaging to explore.

Via Kottke, where there is embedded a similarly adapted Star Wars movie.  Creator comments here.

"Coyote tooth dentures"

Coyote tooth dentures on display at Eastern California Museum. These human dentures were made by melting celluloid toothbrush handles. In the early 1900′s a man who lost his teeth shaped melted toothbrushes to his gums, and then pressed the teeth of dead coyote into them." 

Reposted from 2016 while I visit the dentist today.  The photo and text are from a Tumblr site that has undergone linkrot, but I found the same information reposted at The Museum of Ridiculously Interesting Things. 

"Chicken-footed" building (Sami storehouse)

Traditional raised Sami storehouse, displayed at Skansen, Stockholm. A similar structure, the izbushka, is mentioned in Russian children stories as a house with chicken feet.

I haven't found any further information on this design.  The izbushka is mentioned in a Wikipedia article on Baba Yaga:

He journeyed onwards, straight ahead [...] and finally came to a little hut; it stood in the open field, turning on chicken legs... Ivan walks for some time before encountering a small hut identical to the first... After walking for some time, Ivan eventually finds the chicken-legged hut of the youngest of the three sisters turning in an open field.

There are a number of images of chicken-legged huts retrievable at Google Images, most of them related to the Baba Yaga tale.

I would have to assume that the Sami structure is a practical rather than a whimsical creation, developed in response to the types of wood/driftwood available and probably the presence of a difficult-to-penetrate (frozen) ground or unstable (thawing) tundra and the need to elevate the storehouse above predators.

No time to look it up now.  Some readers may wish to pursue the matter on their own.

Photo credit m.prinke. 

Addendum: Reader Steve notes the similarity to English "staddle stones":

...originally used as supporting bases for granaries, hayricks, game larders, etc. The staddle stones lifted the granaries above the ground thereby protecting the stored grain from vermin and water seepage. In Middle English staddle or stadle is stathel, from Old English stathol, a foundation, support or trunk of a tree...

The staddle stones usually had a separate head and base which gave the whole structure a 'mushroom' like appearance. Different areas in the United Kingdom had different designs. The base varied from cylindrical to tapered rectangular to near triangular. Flat topped cone shaped staddle stones are to be found in parts of the Isle of Wight. The tops are flat to support the beams, however some variation does exists, such as square tops, fluted designs, slate tops, etc.

Old land deeds in northeastern United States often refer to Oak Staddle or Walnut Staddle. These deeds are from the late 18th century to the middle 19th century. Either the owners would cut a tree leaving the stump and request that the surveyors measure to it, or the surveyor would measure out to the location of a new lot corner and a staddle would be inserted into the ground like a boundary stone.

Reposted from 2012 because I just discovered that I have some Sami blood, so I'm doing some research.

Addendum: reader adeus found an example of a Sami storehouse with a less elaborate design -

"Dead salmon hats" worn by orcas

It's something that orcas do, and of course orcas can do whatever they want, because who/what is going to tell them otherwise?  I saw the story at the CBC:

In what may seem like a call-back to 1980s whale culture, a resident orca off the coast of Washington state was recently spotted sporting a dead salmon on its head.  The phenomenon was first documented in 1987 when whales from three separate pods were seen wearing salmon on their heads, like a human wears a hat.

But scientists never understood why, and experts are still scratching their heads as they contemplate the most recent incident, documented in October.  The director of the University of British Columbia's Marine Mammal Research Unit, Andrew Trites, said there's no obvious reason for the behaviour.

Photo credit in the watermark, via.

Breakdancer developed scalp tumor

Annotated composite image created from the originals in The Washington Post.  For the busy TLDR readers, the tumor is fibrotic tissue, not malignancy.  For "tell me more" readers, the original report on "headspin hole" is in the British Medical Journal.

"Where the sun don't shine" (normally...)

Instagram influencers are promoting "perineum sunning" as a health practice.

“In a mere 30 seconds of sunlight on your butthole, you will receive more energy from this electric node than you would in an entire day being outside with your clothes on,” says an influencer, who goes by Ra of Earth. In a viral video that has racked up more than 35,000 views, he gestures toward the sun as three naked men lie down, point their backsides to the sky and make sounds of pleasure.

“[Thirty] seconds of direct sunlight injection to the anal orifice is equivalent to being outside in the sun all day!”

You can read more about this in the New York Post.

Addendum:  complication reported (anal tissue is very sensitive to sunburn)

Reposted from 2020 to accompany my new post on "sunscreen absolutism."

Interesting footwear

Might give added gait stability, like using a three-point cane.

Found at (where else?) the Awful Taste But Great Execution subreddit.

Jewelry made from baby teeth

I found this image at the often-interesting Awful Taste But Great Execution subreddit.  A related subreddit is It's Always Teeth.

Tongue lesions of Mpox

From a case report in the New England Journal of Medicine:

Testing of a tongue lesion with a polymerase-chain-reaction assay for the virus that causes mpox (formerly known as monkeypox) was positive. A diagnosis of mpox was made. During the eruptive phase of mpox, a rash is very common, but isolated oral mucosal lesions may be the only mucocutaneous manifestation — as occurred in this case. 

Medieval knights battling snails

Snails are surprisingly common depictions in the marginalia of medieval manuscripts, often depicted in battle with armored knights.

Sometimes the creatures appear to be hovering, attacking knights in mid-air. Occasionally there is more than one. This is the uniquely medieval phenomenon of the fighting snail – and to this day, why they were depicted remains utterly mysterious...

But for a brief period in the late 13th Century, illuminators – those who decorated books – across Europe embraced a new obsession: fighting snails. For a comprehensive study of these warring gastropods, the art historian Lilian Randall counted 70 examples, in 29 different books – most of which were printed in the two decades between 1290 and 1310. The illustrations are found across Europe, but particularly in France, where there was a thriving manuscript-production industry at the time, says Clarke.

The specific scenarios that warring snails found themselves in varied, but broadly followed the same format of a snail-assailant standing off against a knight. Often, the molluscs have their antenna – technically their upper tentacles, or ommatophores – pointed aggressively forwards, as though they were swords. In one, a snail is shown fighting a nude woman. In a few they're not depicted as regular molluscs at all, but hybrids between snails and men – who are being ridden by rabbits, naturally.

More information, and many illustrations, at the BBC.  Image (cropped for size) credit to The British Library.

How to remove a spider from your ear

A 64-year-old woman with hypertension presented to the otolaryngology clinic with a 4-day history of abnormal sounds in her left ear. On the day of symptom onset, she had awoken to the feeling of a creature moving inside her left ear. Subsequent incessant beating, clicking, and rustling sounds had led to insomnia. On physical examination, a small spider was seen moving within the external auditory canal of the left ear (see video). The molted exoskeleton of the spider was also present. The tympanic membrane was normal. The spider and exoskeleton were removed with the use of a suction cannula placed through an otoscope. In cases of larger spiders or insects in the external auditory canal, instillation of lidocaine or ethanol is recommended for killing the animal before removal in order to prevent excessive movements and subsequent damage to the structures of the ear. However, liquids should not be introduced into the ear if the tympanic membrane has been perforated. After removal of the spider and exoskeleton, the patient’s symptoms immediately abated.

Case report from the New England Journal of Medicine (video at the link).

She wanted a giant dick on her grave

Before her death, 99-year-old Catarina Orduña Pérez had one final wish: a giant statue of a dick on top of her grave.

Her family unveiled the completed monument — a 5-and-a-half-foot-tall cock and balls weighing nearly 600 pounds — mounted on her tomb at a cemetery in Mexico this past weekend as a “recognition of her love and joy for life.”..

“She always said, in the Mexican sense, that we were vergas,” said Mota Limón.

There are few words in Mexican slang as dynamic as “verga,” which is perhaps best translated in English as “cock” due to its general use as a profanity. Depending on how it’s phrased, “verga” can be a brutal insult, telling someone to go fuck themselves (vete a la verga) or that they’re not worth shit (vales verga). Or it can be a compliment, a badge of honor, that if something is “verga,” it’s cool or badass.

Doña Cata often used it with that sort of colloquial pride when referring to the members of her family as vergas, according to her grandson; that they were people of moral fortitude, with “integrity, courage, passion, and at the same time, love and joy,” said Mota Limón.

The story continues at Vice.

A very unusual postage stamp design

It depicts concrete.  Furthermore, "to give the concrete wall depicted in the design a tactile dimension, cement pigments were added to the ultra-matte finish."  This stamp is part of a series that began with a depiction of canvas:

More information at Swiss Post, via Kottke.