The 5 Most Surreal Financial Apocalypses from History. Nothing in the world is more taken for granted than money -- our only concern is whether we have enough of it, not whether it will work at all.
Nobody puts in ten hours of overtime and spends the whole time praying that by payday the grocery store will still accept the currency ... despite the fact that this exact situation has played out again and again. Money is a fragile thing, vulnerable to a whole lot of societal factors that you have no control over whatsoever. Which is why sometimes things just go completely insane ... #5. Hungary's 13,600,000,000,000,000 Percent Inflation So you head down to the grocery store to get a box of Pop-Tarts for lunch, because you live alone and haven't flipped the page on your Dragonriders of Pern calendar in three months. 12 Old War Photographs You Won't Believe Aren't Photoshopped. War is hell.
It costs lives, shatters souls and picks at the spare threads that hang from society's seams until the whole thing unravels like a cheap Christmas sweater. War, indeed, is hell. But, man -- all morality and sanctity of human life and blah blah blah aside -- sometimes it just looks plain friggin' crazy, doesn't it? #12. World War II Sure Had Some Creative Setpieces Via Theatlantic.com Oh, come on -- that's a still from an Indiana Jones movie. But nope: It's totally real. Via Wikimedia Commons"With monuments like this to inspire us, nothing unfathomably vile could ever happen in Germany! " Now let's fast forward past a few decades of boring civil engineering and construction and get to the action: As the Americans fought their way across Eastern Germany, 150 SS fanatics holed up in the monument and packed the sucker full of enough ammo and food to hold on until their Necromonger reinforcements could arrive.
7 Lost Bodies of Work (That Would Have Changed Everything) History has one hell of a chronic problem when it comes to keeping some of the greatest triumphs in human achievement safe from the triumphs of greater assholes.
As a result, a whole lot of the most important stuff humans have ever created has been destroyed or lost. 5 Ridiculous Ancient Beliefs That Turned Out to Be True. We've worked pretty hard here at Cracked to establish the fact that people from the past were batshit insane.
They believed some of the most ridiculous things imaginable, though you can't blame them considering that instead of scientists, they had crazy people claiming to be oracles. Yet... some of the outlandish myths wound up suspiciously close to the mark. How? We have no idea. The Myth: 13 Old War Photographs You Won't Believe Aren't Photoshopped. #6.
The Guns Straight Out of Looney Tunes Via Warhistory.ie No. Nooo, that's not -- that's a cartoon, right? If you panned out on this image, you'd find a smug rabbit standing there about to put his finger in the barrel. "Every time we try to fire, it just apologizes for drinking too much and makes some excuse about work in the morning. " Apparently not. During WWII, the biggest problem a tank driver had was enemy infantry getting close enough to the vehicle to enter a blind zone -- the area immediately surrounding the tank that any soldiers inside simply couldn't angle to shoot at. Via Warhistory.ieAnd if you rotate the image 90 degrees to the right, it's how you put gas in your car. Not only did the bullet fail to hilariously explode on its way out of the floppy dong rifle, but it would neatly fragment in the curve, creating a devastating shotgun-like effect.
. #5. Via Pacificstorm.net #4. Via Retronaut.co. The 5 Most Adorable Stories in the History of War. There are two places you'll never expect to find stories of cuteness: the toilet and battlefronts.
And while we have yet to hear anything adorable coming from the former, we do know a few heartwarming stories that happened at the scene of some of history's most brutal struggles. #5. The Okunoshima Chemical Weapons Bunny Rabbit Factory From Gettysburg to Verdun, areas involved in wartime atrocities carry their scars decades after the actual fighting has stopped. But sometimes, just sometimes, nature takes a look at that shit and decides to reclaim what was once ruined by humans -- Disney-style.
For example, Okunoshima is a tiny island just off mainland Japan that was the hub of Japan's chemical warfare program during World War II, housing facilities that produced atrocious amounts of deadly mustard gas. MonocrolightAnd thousands of gallons of buried nerve gas. Takaaki NishiokaAnd, just like that, the most brutal war in human history was totally worth it. Hundreds upon hundreds of bunnies. 5 Things Old Magazines Apparently Believed About Women. We could learn a lot by simply listening to the Greatest Generation.
We could hear tales of bravery, and honor, and sacrifice. But they're old, and that's boring. If we listen to their badass old-timey magazines instead, we could learn a hell of a lot more interesting shit. Like how to properly wield a weasel as a makeshift flail, how best to stab a gorilla in order to maintain an erection and now, thanks to the manliest magazines this side of Whiskey Fights Weekly, we can learn the answer to that age-old question: Where do women come from? (Spoiler alert: It's hell.)
If you're just going by their depiction in men's magazines of the '40s and '50s, then women were, at best, a dangerous obstacle, and at worst, some sort of savage cannibalistic race of Breast Nazis. #5. But look at the men's faces: They're not elated that they just hacked open the Nazi poon-train like a pornographic Cadbury Egg. "Zis is ... everything ... You know why they're so jaded with the Skank Express? #4.