#Toynbee tiles kansas city movie#
#Toynbee tiles kansas city license#

The weight of cars, as they run over the tile, forces the layers of tar paper to impregnate the spaces in the cracks of the letters. A layer of raw tar seemed to lie beneath the whole tile, anchoring it. The tile is secured to the street by intricately folded and layered tar paper, glued together. The inlay letters seemed to made from a less maleable substance, and in this case were red and yellow. The letters are cut out of a material with, I assume, a higher rubber content than a standard floor tile. in Philadelphia.) The tiles are just that – tiles….although not the standard vinyl floor tile, as I had suspected. (This tile, by the way, is located on 13th. Of course I was beside myself with excitement and I could now see exactly how, and of what materials these tiles are made. Upon closer inspection, I discovered it to be a “Toynbee Idea” tile – freshly placed and only minutes old. On my way home I noticed something unusual in the street.

I had gone to my local convenience store for a snack around 4:00 A.M., noticing nothing unusual. The highlight of my search for answers to this mystery occurred one Sunday night of this previous winter. One Toynbee Tile enthusiast has claimed that a freshly laid tile was once found and examined: Some people also suppose that he is European, given that Kubrick and Toynbee are both English, and because one of the paranoid-ranting plaques indicates that he is/was hiding in Dover, England. And given the diverse locales where the tiles can be found, he has the means and money to travel. He is certainly creative, as the messages’ delivery system indicates, and he must be a patient and methodical man to have invested the time in making these 130 or so tiles by hand.

Either this man is disturbed, or he has a bizarre sense of humor. There is only one known intersection between the works of Toynbee and Kubrick, and it’s pretty circumstantial: Toynbee’s writings spoke of a man named Zoroaster who conceived the idea of monotheism, and this name also occurs in the title of the famous 2001: A Space Odyssey theme song it’s entitled “Thus Spoke Zoroaster.”ĭue to strong similarity in craftsmanship and writing style, these tiles are most likely the work of a single individual (in the interest of conserving slashes and pronouns, we’ll assume this individual is a male).

#Toynbee tiles kansas city movie#

Some of the tiles mention Kubrick, the filmmaker responsible for 2001: A Space Odyssey, which was a movie that made implications that a man was reborn on a mission to Jupiter, not exactly resurrected. Toynbee, a religious historian born in England in 1889. The tiles all mention “Toynbee,” most likely Arnold J. Somehow, someone is managing to embed these tiles into public roads⁠- some of which are busy 24/7⁠- without being spotted. To date, about 130 tiles have been discovered. Some have even shown up in South America in Brazil, Argentina, and Chile. Similar tiles have appeared in many US cities, including Washington DC, Pittsburgh, New York City, Baltimore, Boston, and many more. So, he created a website devoted to the mysterious tiles, and in doing so learned that it is not just a local phenomenon. So Bill started asking around about these tiles, but nobody knew anything about their origin or meaning. Obey.” Some were accompanied by lengthy, paranoid diatribes about the newsmedia, jews, and the mafia.

#Toynbee tiles kansas city license#

They were generally about the size of a license plate, and each had some variation of the same strange message: “TOYNBEE IDEA IN KUbricK’s 2001 RESURRECT DEAD ON PLANET JUPiTER.” They varied a bit in color and arrangement, but they were all made of an unidentifiable hard substance, and many had footnotes as strange as the message itself, such as “Murder every journalist, I beg you,” and “Submit. In 1992, a chap in Philadelphia by the name of Bill O’Neill starting noticing strange tiles randomly embedded in local roads.