Take this Photoshop!

As you’ve probably seen in many of my posts, I always like to congratulate Mother Nature whenever I find some of her masterpieces that exceed even the powers of the mighty god Photoshop. This time I’d like to introduce you to the amazing terraced thermal pools of Pamukkale, Turkey. One of the country’s most popular tourist attractions, Pamukkale, which means Cotton Castle in Turkish, is unique in the world, the hot turquoise waters bathing the pearl white calcium pools can’t be found anywhere else. The water from the hot springs runs off the plateau and the calcium that it contains deposits in the pool, giving the whole landscape that cotton look. That’s how Pamukkale was formed over millions of years, but as we’ve grown used to do, we humans have started to ruin everything in just a few years. Due to excessive tourism, the pools have started deteriorating and they’re currently closed to the public to preserve what’s left.

Even so, Pumakkale is a site worth visiting even if just to take some photos of the breathtaking scenery and to use the springs’ thermal waters, that are said to cure the eyes, asthma, rheumatism and more.

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Man would I like to have that baby in my living-room…

Unfortunately that is simply impossible, considering it is one of a kind and designed especially for UEFA Champion’s League Finals ad for Dutch beer, Amstel. Still only seeing it and imagining how playing foosball on a 22 player table would be like, is worth it. The table can be dismantled and packed into 6 cases for transportation. Who knows, maybe after they’ll have filmed the ad, they’ll auction it or something, so keep your ears open and your savings close by.

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Now this is what I call stretching it!

The women of the Padaung tribe in northern Thailand hold the record for the longest necks in the world. According to tribal custom, even before they reach puberty, girls must start wearing iron coils around their necks and more and more are added through the years. The Padaung women say they only feel initial discomfort, as the distance between the ear lobe and the collar bone is stretched to 10 inches, double the average.

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Not a monument like I originally thought, but cool nontheless

Commissioned and unveiled last year by the Discovery Channel to promote one of its reality shows, London Ink, this giant swimmer swims his way through the grass on the South Bank of the river Thames, near Tower Bridge. first time I saw this work of art I thought it was meant to symbolize something like the British ambition or competitive spirit, not a lousy advertisement scheme. Oh well, at least it looks cool.

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That’s what I’d say this man is doing through his performances.

Johan Lorbeer is a German performing artist that became famous in his home country through his Still Life street shows. Through a very ingenious optical illusion, Lorbeer makes it seem like he is defying gravity just by leaning off buildings. Try to guess how he pulls this stunt off and learn if you guessed right by looking at the last photo.

Although he is clearly a brilliant artist and has been performing for quite some time, Johan Lorbeer is still semi-unknown on an international level. Here’s a link to his personal page.

It’s Segway meets motorcycle and it’s beautiful.

Believe it or not, this little beauty was built by 18 year-old Ben J.Poss Gulak who used Google StretchUp to draw up the plans, since he couldn’t afford professional software. Even though he had some help from motorcycle modders and robotics experts, he deserves to be congratulated.

Unveiled for the first time at the Toronto National Motorbike Show, Uno has two wheels but not one in front of the other, but right next to each other. It’s an electric vehicle with two micro-gyro engines, much like the Segway, one for forward and back and the other for turning. It only has one control, the on/off switch, everything else is done by leaning.

Ben came up with the idea of an eco-friendly vehicle when he was in China where “the smog was so thick, we never saw the sun.”

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Don’t look at the photos and video if you’re a big animal lover, it’s “a little” hard to take in…

This “bay of blood” set somewhere in the Faroe Islands is where hundreds, sometimes thousands of pilot whales are literally butchered alive by hungry locals. The hunt known as Grindadrap is centuries old and it hasn’t changed much since then, except for the power-boats, radios and echo-sounders which make life a lot easier for the butchers. They round the poor whales into the shore with the power-boats and when they get really close, the locals plunge into the waves and start hooking them to death in a horrific manner. Then they drag the carcasses to shore and start skinning them and splitting the meat and blubber between all the islands’ inhabitants.

The Faroes economy relies only on economic fishing, but that doesn’t give them the right to slaughter 544 Atlantic white sided dolphins in a single day, like they did in 1988.

recently, studies have shown that the meat and blubber of pilot whales contain high amounts of mercury, PCBs, DDT and dieldrin. For what they do every year these animals deserve to get much more than mercury poisoning. Read More »

That’s right folks there’s such a thing as a World Pizza Championship.

It’s hosted in Salsomaggiore Terme, Italy and it gathers tens of professional pizza makers from allover the world. The most impressive challenge of the entire contest is the pizza tossing, an acrobatic event involving the pizza dough. As you can see from the pics, these guys are true masters tossing giant pies into the air or spinning them on their fingers like basketballs and there are even synchronized-dancers performing with pizza dough. Must really cool to watch these guys go all out to take the title of best pizza maker in the world. So, if you’re ever in Italy…

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You know what happens if you drop a sweet mint into a bottle of coke right? What if 1500 people did it at the same time?

That’s what 1500 students from a University in Belgium tried to find out and also set a new world record for the world’s biggest Mentos fountain. It wasn’t the most important experiment in the lives of the young chemistry students, but I can bet it was the funniest one.

You can see the result of the experiment in the photos below, too bad I couldn’t find any more.

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Apparently there are those who think the Fuhrer was a hero.

Some of these people live in the Ukraine, where an Adolf Hitler action-figure has gone on sale. The $200 doll is compared to Barbie by sales-women in Kiev and, just like the famous blond, it comes complete with accessories and several changes of clothes. Although any form of Nazism or fascism is prohibited in the Ukraine, the dolls are already on sale and will be mas-produced starting this summer. This is a result of growing extreme right political sentiment and increasing xenophobia and racism.

It looks like some Ukrainians, especially the young ones, have forgotten that Hitler killed 3 million of them during WWII, including 1.5 million Jews. He wanted to turn the country into slave populated buffer zone with Russia, now they think he was a hero…that’s sad.

The doll comes with a spare head that gives Hitler a kinder face…because he was such a kind person?!?

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An unusual building-models exhibition took place in Kiev recently, with famous national landmarks being built out of Easter eggs. It took almost 17.000 eggs to recreate Saint Sophia Cathedral and a city of castles Kamenets-Podolsky. The roof of the cathedral has been painted gold. The eggs of this Ukrainian egg-map will be given as souvenirs after the gallery closes.

I never knew traditional Nigerian Boxing is one of the deadliest sports in the world.

Practiced by traveling young African men, Dambe is one of the few ways they can become famous in a country like Nigeria. The winner of a Dambe tournament gets around $100, a TV-set and the honor of being a champion, not much for what he has to go through.

All a fighter has to do to win a fight is knock down his opponent only once in three rounds, but if the two are evenly matched, a fight can go on for hours. As you can see in the photos, fighters wear a flax cord rapped around one of their fists. They wet the string and sprinkle sand on it to make his punches more painful. The other hand is used to taunt and trick the opponent into letting his guard down. Many have been seriously injured and even died practising this blood sport, but as many fighters complain, there isn’t much an unemployed Nigerian can do to find fame.

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Well this guy has a pair of undershorts tattooed on his body so technically he isn’t naked.

If you’re ever in Barcelona, you might get “lucky” and run into “the old naked guy“. No one knows his name but everybody knows him, he’s kind of a local mascot, walking around in the nude with his huge penis hanging down halfway to his knees. Tourists either avoid him or just stop and stare at him, but he doesn’t seem to mind. The police have tried to reason with him and he has even been institutionalized a few times but he always came back.

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And I don’t mean in heaven, just 50 meters above the ground.

If you really want to surprise your friends or business partners and want to throw a dinner that they’ll never forget, you might consider a Dinner in the Sky. All you have to do is contact the guys at Diner in the Sky.com,tell them how you’d like them to customize the table and they’ll come with their giant crane in any place on earth as long as there is a 500 square meters surface that can be secured. You can invite up to 22 people to this unbelievable dinner in the sky for a period of 8 hours. You’ll only be accompanied by a chef, waiter and an entertainer, so you’ll have the whole sky to yourself.

Quite an original service these guys are providing, I’m sure business must be good.

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That’s one big barrel but the saying applies perfectly.

And I don’t mean it in a figurative sense, that dumb-ass is literally shooting tuna-fish with a kind of shotgun. Now I’m not in the fishing business, but I’m pretty sure that’s not the standard way of putting fish to sleep. And by the looks of that last photo, these guys are doing all this for business AND PLEASURE. Some people never cease to amaze me with their cruelty, some shoot fish in a barrel, others smash helpless baby seals’ skulls in, where does it all end?

I hope someone who can actually do something about it sees this atrocity.