Tuesday, October 19, 2010

The World is Upside Down (And Backwards)


The way the world is these days, you might think it’s upside-down and backwards. Well, you’re right. You may have heard of “the” upside-down house pictured above. There are actually a large number of upside-down houses in the world; they could fill a single post (and they might, eventually.) For now, the following are a few things that are upside-down, but shouldn’t be.
Heaven, Pointed at Hell
Upside-Down House Sculpture
Photo Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/gusilu/
The above is a photo of “The Device to Root Out Evil”, a sculpture by the American artist Dennis Oppenheim. This crazy contraption is an inverted church formerly located in a public park in Vancouver, but due to controversy over its apparent blasphemy, the sculpture was moved in the summer of 2008 to the Glenbow Museum in Calgary, where it continues to root out the evil of modern art.
No, It’s Not a Dodo Raised from Extinction

No, the above image is not photoshopped. It is an actual picture of a greylag goose, taken in 2009 by 73-year-old wildlife photographer Brian MacFarlane in Norfolk, England. These crazy birds–and many other kinds of birds, mainly geese–do something called “whiffling”. It allows them to drop from the sky like a rock, especially in high winds, for a faster landing. It may look out-of-control, but the experts assure us it is not. Same goes for stunt planes.

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Flying upside down is something stunt planes do all the time. To allow for this, the engines and hydraulics of such planes must be modified to fool them into thinking they are right-side up. This avoids a stall. But have you heard of landing a plane upside-down? Go ahead and try this at home, kids, with your Boeing 757! Totally safe. Promise. Don’t tell mom!

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