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There isn’t too much info on all of these amazingly weird buildings over on Bored Panda, but the name of each building is there if you want to learn more about the places. For example, this is The Crooked House in Poland.
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Earlier this month was National Sisters Day, which got me thinking about famous sibling duos. I thought it would be fun to share a list of the most famous of these sister pairings, but to be fair, there are so many famous pairs of sisters out there that it would be impossible to list them all. That’s why I’ve decided to leave out most of the contemporary examples you’re probably already familiar with, like Paris and Nikki Hilton and Venus and Serena Williams. I’ve also left out all of the popular sister singing groups from the last hundred years because there are so darn many of them between the Pointer Sisters, The Andrews Sisters and the gals from Heart.
That being said, here are some sisters who impacted history.
These not-so-attractive ladies are probably some of the earliest examples of famous sister groups, even if they aren’t exactly real. The Graeae were three ancient goddesses from Greek mythology who shared one eye and one tooth amongst the group. While they were actually archaic goddesses, when they interacted with humans, they usually took the form of old witches.
Perseus stole the eye of the witches when they were passing it amongst themselves and used it to force the Graeae to tell him where the three objects he needed to kill Medusa were hidden. Thus, the Graeae were instrumental in the killing of Medusa, who was one of their sisters. Even if these siblings aren’t real, the story has been so long-lasting that it’s hard to imagine it not having any impact on European history to some extent.
Around the same time that tales of Jesus were starting to be spread through the Middle East, two Vietnamese sisters were kicking butt, leading a revolt against the Chinese oppression of their country.
It all started when Trung Trac fell in love and married a man named Thi Sach. The Chinese rulers of Vietnam were making assimilation into their way of life mandatory and when Thi Sach took a stand against the repression of his culture, he was executed. His death was supposed to be a warning against all those who would consider rebelling, but instead it spurred his wife and sister-in-law, Trung Nhi, to take up his cause and fight against the Chinese.
The two sisters were raised learning martial arts and studying the art of warfare, so when it was time to start a rebellion, they were ready. In 39 AD, the two women repelled a small Chinese unit from their village and started to assemble a large army of rebels –mostly women according to popular legends. Within a few months, they already had taken back over 60 citadels from the Chinese and had liberated the kingdom of Nam Viet. The two were named as queens of their free country and they were able to keep the territory free from the Chinese for over two years.
more …
Spiderman hasn’t come to save the day, he’d rather go around annoying people while capturing all the fun on video camera. In Poland, Spiderman hits the streets and harasses the people he once saved, using his arsenal of silly string and lasso to really tick them off. You’d think this wannabe superhero would be in better shape, considering how often he has to run from the cops!
-via ComicsAlliance
In Poland there is a small forest of pine trees that grow with a bend in the middle of their trunk and no one knows why. They kind of look like a cartoon tree that is trying to avoid being chopped down, bending whenever the lumber jack swings his ax.
In a tiny corner of western Poland a forest of about 400 pine trees grow with a 90 degree bend at the base of their trunks – all bent northward. Surrounded by a larger forest of straight growing pine trees this collection of curved trees, or “Crooked Forest,” is a mystery.
It’s difficult to determine exactly what is going on here, because the small amount of information that came with this video is in Polish. Zenek is the “mascot” of the Lublin University of Technology’s superconductor laboratory. Isn’t he cute? -via Arbroath
A one-car train pulls into a station in Poland. The passengers get out. They keep coming. Then you start to wonder where they all came from. According to the YouTube comments, this is typical in Poland. -via the Presurfer
Jane Korman’s 89-year-old father Adolek Kohn arrived at Auschwitz in a cattle car over 65 years ago. In 2009, he returned to Auschwitz and other locations in Poland associated with the Holocaust and did a victory dance with his daughter and several of his grandchildren. See parts two and three of this project as well. When Korman first exhibited the videos in Australia, she received quite a bit of criticism:
Many Jewish survivors have reacted gravely to the video, accusing her of disrespect. Yet Korman told Australian daily The Jewish News that “it might be disrespectful, but he [her father] is saying ‘we’re dancing, we should be dancing, we’re celebrating our survival and the generations after me,’ – the generation he’s created. We are affirming our existence.”
What do you think: affirmation or disrespect? -via Buzzfeed and Metafilter
Some of the prisoners liberated from Auschwitz in 1945 recreated the scenes of their lives there in art. An online exhibit places those artworks side-by-side with photographs of Auchwitz taken many years later.
In 1979, The Auschwitz Museum Archive reproduced selected pieces of art and sent them to writer/photographer Alan Jacobs.
After years of related work and many more trips, Jacobs, and his son Jesse, returned to the camps in 1996 to find and photograph the identical scenes depicted in the art. Krysia Jacobs then devised a way to present them as you see here. They are the result of work over a 24 year period.
An explanatory text, which may be disturbing, accompanies each image. Link -via Metafilter
(image credit: Mieczyslaw Koscielniak/Auschwitz Museum Archive)
Michael R. Barrick created a graphic last summer using the Vancouver Olympics mascots and the internet cartoon character Pedobear. The image shows up in a Google image search for the mascots, so it was only a matter of time before someone used it without knowing that Pedobear is not an Olympic mascot. The graphic showed up this weekend in the Polish newspaper Gazeta Olsztyn. Link
Authorities responded to reports of a bear seen near the village of Chorzow in Poland. A ranger shot the animal with a tranquilizer gun, but it either didn’t work or the bear was immune.
Unfortunately for the rangers tasked with capturing the animal, it woke up from its apparent slumber as they came near and gave chase to the man who had shot it.
Thanks to the efforts of both men, the bear was eventually brought under control. Reports said authorities plan to take it to a local zoo.
Ever wonder how IKEA makes their furniture sturdy yet light? The secret is the honeycomb skeleton inside their tabletops. National Geographic went inside an IKEA factory in Poland: Link
Students at Politechnika Wroc?awska or the Wroclawska University of Technology in Poland had themselves a grand ol’ time rigging their dorm with a light show that played the theme from Knight Rider.
After this clip, check out their website P.I.W.O.3 (Google Translate) for many more video clips.
From the Upcoming 
ueue, submitted by oezicomix.
For independent farmers in Poland in the 1960s, it was nearly impossible to acquire a tractor. Any agricultural machines made in Poland during this period went to state-owned farms, and were too expensive for a private farmer to purchase. Plus, they weren’t tough enough for mountain farms.
So enterprising farmers built their own tractors, using decommissioned army vehicles, pre-WWII German machines, and anything else they could find.
Photographer Lukasz Skapski traveled throughout the Polish countryside to document these homemade tractors, and found vehicles that could climb very steep roads, go faster than allowed, and were still trucking after 40 years.
Photo by Lukasz Skapski, courtesy Zak Gallery
Link – via darkroastedblend
From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by Marilyn Terrell.
Environuts, … er, green enthusiasts were up in arms when they discovered an illegal logging site in Poland’s nature reserve. The police busted the culprit:
Environmentalists found 20 neatly stacked tree trunks and others marked for felling with notches at the beauty-spot at Subkowy in northern Poland.
But police followed a trail left where one tree had been dragged away – and found a beaver dam right in the middle of the river. A police spokesman said: "The campaigners are feeling pretty stupid. There’s nothing more natural than a beaver."
Link – via The Evangelical Outpost
