Humans: Quirky, Clever and Diverse

Posted by Focus on Arts and Ecology on - -

Welcome to highlights of humans exhibiting our quirky, clever and diverse nature. Each section will help you see humans and our world from a different perspective.

First we’ll start of with some humor as we observe human attempts at logistics. The slideshow that originated these images is from the Czech Republic, but I couldn’t get any further info. I wish I could thank the person who assembled these photographs because I’ve seen lots of collections about logistics and this was the best I’ve seen. Also I can’t thank the person who sent me the link to the slideshow because it’s been waiting in my downloads file for years waiting for me to figure out how to save images off of power point.

The pictures are often not of great quality because they were taken spur-of-the-moment to capture a moving target. But look past the quality and I guarantee you will marvel and/or get a chuckle out of at least one of them

Make sure you notice the pail.

I’m pretty sure those are eggs in his baskets.

Could this be a school bike? It’s yellow and the kids are in their school uniforms.

Please don’t miss the humor in this. It took me a second look.

Now we’ve got some intriguing statistics, mostly about the US. I can’t vouch for precise accuracy but choose to believe they are close enough to help us think of things in a new and different way.

The Empire State building has its own zip code.

Kansas produces enough wheat each year to feed everyone in the world for about two weeks.

The entire Denver International Airport is twice the size of Manhattan.

The number of bourbon barrels in Kentucky outnumbers the state’s population by more than two million.

There’s a town in Washington with treetop bridges made specifically to help squirrels cross the street.

The total length of Idaho’s ‘s rivers could stretch across the United States about 40 times.

It would take more than 400 years to spend a night in all of Las Vegas”s hotel rooms.

Only one-third of all $100 bills are actually inside the United States. Many are under mattresses all over the world because of money laundering.

In 1922, a man built a house and all his furniture entirely out of 100,000 newspapers. The structure still stands today in Rockport, Massachusetts.

South Florida is the only place in the world where alligators and crocodiles coexist in the wild.

The Library of Congress contains approximately 838 miles of bookshelves—long enough to stretch from Houston to Chicago.

The Los Angeles Coroner’s Office has its own quirky gift shop called Skeletons in the Closet.

There is enough water in Lake Superior to cover all of North and South America in one foot of liquid.

In 1872, Russia sold Alaska to the Unites States for about 2 cents per acre.

There is enough concrete in the Hoover Dam to build a two-lane highway from San Francisco to New York City.

There is an island full of wild monkeys off the coast of South Carolina called Morgan Island, and it’s not open to humans.

“The World in Faces” is the remarkable project of Australia-based photographer Alexander Khimushin. By photographing people of different nationalities and disappearing ethnic minorities in traditional clothing, his goal is to document the cultures that remain. “I often take portraits of elderly people that are the last native speakers of their indigenous language or the last ones who make and wear traditional clothing. Many of the more than 10,000 ethnic groups currently living on this planet might not be around in a decade or two.”

I have found selecting favorites among his images to be nearly impossible. If you are so inclined, I encourage you to look at more of them on his website

Daasanach tribe girl in Ethiopia wearing an animal fur top and a package on her head.

a Wakhi woman of the Wakhan Corridor in northeastern Afghanistan.

Little Ixil, a Mayan girl in Guatemala is seen in full Mayan clothing.

An elderly Nyangatom tribe woman. When girls from this tribe are born they receive a necklace from their father. It is added to throughout their lives.