Slashdot Mirror
Mystery Tiles From Around the World
puppetman writes "The Kansas City Star has an interesting story about Toynbee Tiles.
They show up embedded in streets, and can be found in the US (Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, New York, Baltimore, Aberdeen, Edgewood, Washington, etc), Chile, Argentina and Brazil. They are made of "epoxy or super hard plastic that's actually inlaid in the asphalt itself."
The tiles invariably state, "Toynbee Ideas in Kubrick's 2001 Resurrect Dead On Planet Jupiter".
Sometimes there are secondary tiles that request people make more while others are of a more paranoid slant.
Toynbee was a religious historian who believed that "well-being of a civilization depends on its ability to respond successfully to challenges, human and environmental". There is even a Ray Bradbury book, The Toynbee Convector.
Toynbee.net has a link to a Usenet posting where someone ask's Kubrick's daughter if the man himself knew of the tiles.
To date, the origin of the tiles are a mystery. Any /.'ers able to provide the location of additional tiles, or perhaps clues for solving the mystery?"
A SPACE ODDITY? Strange Kansas City marker part of world-wide mystery
By DOUG WORGUL
The Kansas City Star
More photos
Corner of 13th and Grand, looking south on Grand.
A LIL' JAKE'S BARBECUE BEEF SANDWICH was calling my name. Loudly. Clearly. I had no choice but to heed the call. So there I was, walking north on Grand across 13th Street, with a pang in my gut and Jake's pink concrete pig in view.
Out of the corner of my eye I glimpsed something in the street. Graffiti painted on the pavement.
I stopped to read it and was almost flattened by a Deffenbaugh truck. I jumped up onto the curb and heaved a deep "whew," whereupon I caught a whiff of the sweet smoke emitting from Lil' Jake's smoker and was reminded of my original mission.
About a half-hour later, when I'd finished the aforementioned sandwich, I returned to the corner, waited for the light to turn and traffic to clear then stepped into the intersection to get a closer look at the graffiti. It said:
TOYNBEE IDEA
IN KubricK's `2001
RESURRECT DEAD
ON PLANET JUPiTER.
Yeah, I know. Weird.
It gets weirder.
The message wasn't painted. It was some kind of tile, a bit larger than a license plate, that had actually been imbedded in the street. Each letter looked to have been hand carved and inlaid in a plastic or epoxy base. I tried to push my thumbnail into the tile. It was rock hard. Harder than the asphalt itself.
Probably a "street art" project by a grad student at the Art Institute, I thought as I started back down Grand.
It was 1996. A year of many unexplained phenomena. The Macarena. Tickle-Me-Elmo. Beavis and Butthead.
Since then I've walked right over the thing dozens of times and each time made a mental note to further investigate its origins. And each time promptly mislaid the mental note.
A couple months ago, however, on my way back from Jake's, I made an actual paper note and kept it clutched in my hand all the way back to my cube here at The Star where I "googled" the wording on the strange tile.
Bingo.
Up popped more than 30 Internet addresses referring to other such tiles found in other cities.
Read more and discuss Toynbee
Message board: What do YOU think?
Photo gallery
Toynbee links
Turns out there have been more than 130 documented sightings of these "Toynbee tiles"-- as they're nicknamed on the Net -- in at least 20 cities around the United States (and two in South America!). In New York almost 50 tiles have been counted, in Philadelphia nearly 30. Twenty have been spotted in Baltimore, including four at one intersection. And there have been at least 16 documented sightings in Washington, D.C., -- one a block from the White House.
All the tiles say virtually the same thing. And they all look virtually the same, except some are made with colored letters and others only black letters.
The Internet accounts and stories from other newspapers indicate that the first tiles were discovered in the late 80s. Nobody has ever claimed to have witnessed any of the tiles being imbedded. And nobody has ever publicly claimed responsibility for making the tiles.
So, what are they?
Perhaps the urban equivalent of a crop circle. A mysterious sign appearing in the night. A cryptic message left behind by beings with a seemingly extraterrestrial agenda.
Or perhaps by a paranoid journalist-hating Nazi. In some cities, the basic tiles are sometimes accompanied by an adjacent tile that urges people to "Murder all journalists, I beg you!" And in Philadelphia, next to one of the regular tiles, was a long rant, also made up of individual hand-formed letters imbedded in a tile, that blamed "hellion Jews" (whatever they are) for a long list of personal problems that the tile maker seemed to be experiencing.
I called Kansas City's street department and its media relations officer Nancy Regan agreed to meet me at 13th and Grand to inspect the tile.
"You say
The people of new york are a sad testament, period.
Once fnord you begin to fnord actively fnord notice visual fnord clues they fnord show up everywhere fnord. It's fnord sort of like fnord what happens when fnord you buy fnord a new car. All of fnord a sudden you fnord notice that fnord lots of people are fnord driving the same fnord car, more than fnord you ever noticed fnord before.
No offense, but the fact that someone would suggest that the little yellow line on televised football games and touch-tone phones make up for the lack of commercial space flight is a good sign of exactly how lame the 21st century is turning out to be.
Maybe you should get off your lazy ass and start doing something instead of waiting around for everyone else to do it for you.