The Predator Checks a Map



This undoctored photo is part of an art project--and possibly also an awesome assassination scheme--where they meticulously paint clothing to match the surroundings.

Christmas Tree Decorations in Morocco



This might look like a lazy father's hastily photoshopped answer to the question "Where do baby goat's come from?" But in fact, it's a real photograph taken of real goats in in Morroco.
When food became sparse on the ground, the hoofed creatures simply learned to climb trees. Pretty cool, though we'd imagine it loses some of its luster the first time you park under a tree and your car gets crapped on by a goat.

Sir Please Do Not Walk On My Abstract Painting



This looks to us like one of those awful composite shots of some miniature rocks with a guy shopped in. It's actually a real picture of a frozen river in India, as photographed by Sankar Sridhar,who has all sorts of equally cool photos on his site.
Natives of the area around this river only walk on the ice with padded shoes since anything else would damage the sacred frozen water, and it might refuse to freeze in the future. Boy are these guys going to be pissed when they find out about global warming.

The Streets As Seen by Salvador Dali



This melting building is actually just a regular building covered in a huge tarp with the Dali-esque design painted on it. It's covering an apartment building undergoing renovation in Paris.

Hats off to the French. In a single stroke they hide unsightly construction and fool all passersby into thinking someone spiked their espresso. Now if they could only figure out why people keep plowing their cars into buildings undergoing renovation in Paris.

With New "Content-Aware Fill," You Can Remove Objects With Ease



What looks like a half-done attempt to edit a utility pole out of a landscape is in fact the aftermath of a brushfire in Russia. How exactly they managed to stop the fire right before it burnt out the lines, we're not sure, but we're certainly glad it didn't shut down the market for international brides.

Това последното е много добро

--->

Rocky VII: Rocky Fights a Bear



Allow us to introduce the fighters of this 1949 bout: In the blue corner, Gus Waldorf, a boxer so distinguished that this picture is literally all he's known for. In the red corner, a goddamn bear.

Since they followed boxing protocol as opposed to the bear's preferred combat style of straight up mauling everyone, its teeth and claws were restricted with a muzzle and boxing gloves. And even though the bear went into the ring severely handicapped, Waldorf still lost the fight due to his handicap of not being a bear.




This was not an isolated incident, by the way -- bear-fighting was apparently all the rage back in the day. Here's an Iranian man wrestling a bear in 1951, this time without any of that silly safety equipment.




Which ended about as well for the guy as you'd expect:




We're not sure whether he's suffering the agony of defeat or engaging in some post-fight makeup humping here. The best part is how the guy in the hat registers zero emotion on his face as a bear and fellow human duke it out right in front of him. They might as well be pee-soaked panhandlers as far as Indiana Bored is concerned.


He Was Later Found with a Dick Sharpied on His Forehead




"What is that? Bud? Tastes like piss. Believe me, I know what piss tastes like."



Modern zoos keep animals on strictly controlled diets specifically planned to meet their particular nourishment needs. This is a vast improvement over the 1954 approach of "Dang, all we have left in the fridge is beer and pie and mmmhmm, that pie looks tasty."

Which is why that is, in fact, an official St. Louis Zoo worker offering his gorilla ward a cold one, presumably while his coworkers stand in the background chanting "Chug! Chug! Chug!" The animal in question is Phil the Gorilla, who was famous for his size, showmanship and DUI record. His fratboy persona in this picture is so spot on we're tempted to write Old School II just to cast him. Right after we invent that time machine.

Adventures in Babysitting



One swing and we can find out how quickly evolution can make that baby fly.



Kids tend to picture the circus as a place of whimsy and wonder, as anyone who threatened to run away and join one as a child can tell you. That's because kids are idiots. Of course, in reality it is a job like any other, but only because it involves more shit-shoveling and carny talk than your average numbers-crunching cubicle job.

It's also pretty much a round-the-clock job, so a parent working the circus scene wouldn't always have spare time to spend with their kids. And that's when things got awesome for the children of olden times. Why waste money on a babysitter when you can have a coworker look after your child for you? One you can trust because you've trained her yourself?

And that, friends, is how we ended up with the above picture of an elephant named Kam calmly pushing his trainer's daughter around a London train station, no doubt to the delight of other passengers. We're not sure if the trainer was crazy good or just negligent as hell here, but we'd like to think he also taught Kam how to change the baby's diaper and give her a bath.

Or, at the very least, that game where you throw your baby up in the air and then catch her.

Man, we know it's wrong, but we kind of want to see a picture of that now.

Meanwhile, in India ...




Yep, that's a big-ass gun mounted on a camel.

The Indian Army has a rich history of using camels in warfare, up to the point that when other countries' armies started throwing around big words such as "modernization" and "practicality," India just calmly took all the new technology and strapped them on their damn camels.

No matter how impractical that contraption is, you've got to give some props to that guy. Sure, his camel is likely to bolt the second he fires that thing, and sure, that's going to be the least of his worries once he's searching for his balls that the recoil sent flying farther than the actual mortar ever could -- but right now he's on top of the world, riding a goddamn armed camel.

And, of course, there was no reason to stop at a mere rifle. Ladies and gentlemen, we give you the Camel Cannon:




Because there's no kill like overkill. Practical? No. Awesome? Hell yes. And judging by the smug look on that camel's face, he damn well knows it. He's the Dromedary of Death now, and you will all bow to him. Or else.

Hakuna Ma-Murder-a



"JESUS CHRIST THERE'S A BABY ON MY BACK."



If you like cats, you'll loooooove lions. At least that's what Mr. Charles Hipp thought when he bought himself a lion cub from the Dallas Zoo in 1953. And apparently the zoo agreed, because they had no problem selling a baby big cat to an oil tycoon turned amateur circus putter-onner. Then again, pregnant women also smoked like chimneys back then, so take the zoo's wisdom with a grain of salt.

Once Hipp got the baby lion home, he did what any man with the balls to buy a pet lion would do: let the beast live in his house and routinely put his family in mortal peril for the sake of taking some sweet-ass photos. The picture above is of his granddaughter (a beastmaster-in-training if we ever saw one), riding a lion like it ain't no thing. When Hipp wasn't busy ensuring his grandkids had the most badass baby pictures in history, he gave the neighborhood children rides:



No Animal Ever Looked Sadder




Hey, past! What would be even more impractical and badass than having a lion as a pet?

What? A domesticated rhino? Come on. Now you're just fucking with us.

That sweet beast is Rupert the Rhino in his South African home. In 1960, Rupert was saved from a flood by a vet who then adopted him, because naturally a mere veterinarian couldn't understand the risks of living with a freaking rhino. Rupert repaid the courtesy by deciding to adapt the Disney stratagem instead of the more natural "gore them all the first chance you get and run to the wild" one. He grew into his pet role well and acted not unlike an overgrown guard dog, only occasionally putting his family in mortal terror and committing property damage.

He also ate a ton of bananas.


And fingers.


Rupert was, however, never fully domesticated, presumably because rhino toilets are about as expensive and impractical as they look, and also because he looks like Eeyore in rhino form. The monthly Zoloft bill was even more expensive than the bananas, so Rupert was eventually released back into the wild.

Still, we think cleaning up a living room full of rhino shit was well worth it for the family, because it enabled them to have a family album full of pictures like this:



Because Purse-Sized Dogs Are for Pussies




For a while there, celebutants had fun using little teacup-sized dogs as fashion accessories; they'd carry them around in their bags or on their arms, pose with them at publicity events and generally flaunt how great it is to not care that an animal is shitting in your Louis Vuitton purse.

But today's celebrities have NOTHING on flagrantly using animals to get publicity. Because the starlets of yesteryear bought cheetahs. As pets. The picture at the top is actress Phyllis Gordon shopping in 1939 with a cheetah she had flown in from Kenya, presumably so that she could terrify store clerks into giving her discounts.

Our knee-jerk reflex is to write Gordon off as a solitary eccentric, but she was actually far from being the only actress of her era to own a cheetah. The famous Josephine Baker had Chiquita:




And here Joan Blondell takes the unusually cruel step of color-coordinating with her pet:




We could go on -- cheetahs were basically the go-to pet for famous actresses in those days. If it weren't for the whole animal welfare thing, we almost think it would be pretty awesome to see Paris Hilton try to walk around with one of these on her shoulders.

Ааа... гепард за домашен любимец <3

The Model T Vending Machine




Are you tired of delinquents stealing the hand crank to your Model T? Well, bamboozle those scalawags with a car lift! The fools will either be powerless to harm your car or will die trying to steal it.

This isn't some ridiculous "city of the FUTURE!" concept art; this photo of an "elevator garage" was taken in 1936 Chicago by photographer John Gutmann, and here it is from another angle. All we can picture is us dropping in a nickel to get our car back and then seeing it get stuck at the top like a bag of chips in a vending machine.

The Racist-est Place on Earth




How far back in American history do you have to go to find the Ku Klux Klan openly riding the Ferris wheel, presumably screaming "wheeee!!!" the whole time? To 1928, apparently. That "every day is the carnival when you're in the Klan!" publicity photo was taken in Colorado (the owner of the carnival was also a Klansman).




Call of Duty: Old-Timey Warfare




It's easy for us to laugh, but in 1899 this must have looked like a terrifying vision of the future. Even if the guy was wearing a tie, bowler hat and dress shoes. Back in those days, if you were not the more finely dressed army, you were considered to have lost the war regardless of how much land you seized.

That's inventor F.R. Simms, by the way, demonstrating his Simms Motor Scout armored quadricycle. Can somebody in the comments photoshop this guy onto a battlefield littered with blood and maimed bodies?


Pony Rides Were for Pussies




Wait, did we say Teddy Roosevelt was a badass for riding a moose earlier? In 1920s Louisiana, if you weren't standing on an alligator by age 3, you got sent to a special school.


A scene from D.W. Griffith's Cloverfield




While a cursory glance would suggest foreigners like King Kong, the above is an actual photo from a calamity that befell the Empire State Building on July 28, 1945, at the hands of an American airplane. At 9:49 a.m., Lt. Col. William Smith mistook the tallest man-made structure on the planet for nothing when he banked his B-25 bomber into it.
The plane hit so hard that one engine shot all the way through the building, out the other side, and landed on the roof of another building the next block over. Still, that happened on Saturday and the building was open again on Monday. People were probably sitting at their desks, smoking cigarettes and doing paperwork with smoldering hunks of plane laying all around them.


And It Was the Least-Manly Piece of Grandma's Furniture




This chair, apparently created from a mutated six-footed monstrosity, was a gift to President Andrew Johnson. The grizzly chair was the creation of an admirer named Seth Kinman, who apparently had this much badass to spare.

Back in Those Days, an Oil Spill Went Completely Unnoticed




That ain't Texas, and it sure as hell isn't Saudi Arabia. That's the modern home of hippies and Priuses -- California, as it looked in 1928 (specifically, Huntington Beach). Back in those days if you ran across an otter that wasn't covered in oil, it was considered a source of shame for the community.

How Did It Wind Up on the Second Floor in the First Place?




Here's one you may have seen floating around the Internet. This seemingly impossible shot of a train exploding out of the second floor of a train station is the great derailment of the Granville-Paris Express at Gare Montparnasse on Oct. 22, 1895.

Despite the fact that the train carried more than a hundred passengers and plowed through a goddamn train station, only one person was killed: a woman outside. The image went on to play a direct role in surrealist artwork, inspire countless imitators and ultimately serve as a reminder to humanity just how much the world looks like a freaking toy if you zoom back far enough.



Those Are Not Stilts





If you think they just paired that guy up with a couple of tiny women, you're wrong. Shaquille O'Neal would only come up to his chest.

That's Robert Wadlow of Alton, Illinois, widely believed to be the tallest man who ever lived, at 8 feet 11 inches. He weighed almost 500 pounds and had size 37AA shoes.




In answer to your next question, no, it's not normal for a person to get that size, and he only lived to be 22. Still, he's making people say, "Holy shit, look at that guy!" 70 years after he passed away. Will you be able to say that?

No! The Airplane's Natural Enemy!





It is difficult to discern what is more embarrassing about this picture from 1915 Brussels: The fact that this pilot just lost a fight against a zeppelin, or that he subsequently lost a second fight against a tree?

Ah, well. At least he's in good company:




Yeah, aviation has come a ways since then. Kind of puts those tennis players earlier in another light :



Salvador Dali Hated Cats




That is not a photoshop or otherwise manipulated. The guy standing in front of the easel, as many of you already know, is surrealist Salvador Dali. The photo is the work of photographer Philippe Halsman.



If you're wondering how they came up with this, here's the actual exchange between the two men:

Dali: "I know what the picture should be ... We take a duck and put some dynamite in its derriere. When the duck explodes, I jump and you take the picture."

Halsman: "Don't forget that we are in America. We will be put in prison if we start exploding ducks."

Dali: "You're right. Let's take some cats and splash them with water."

Отнело им е само 26 опита хахахаха

Dali e kult!

26 опита...не е проблем