Founded in 1980 to fight for the rights of animals, PETA made headlines in 1981 by publicizing the Silver Spring monkeys. They apparently blew their idea wad early and have since come up with some ridiculous stunts to promote themselves. This article looks back at the 8 most retarded PETA stunts.

1. Save the Sea Kittens

PETA decided that people eat fish because they aren’t adorable enough (and not because they’re delicious) so they tried to give them a more cuddly image. They produced plush dolls and cute pictures of “Sea Kittens” frolicking like Snorks along with a plethora of sea kitten facts, including gems like: “Sea kittens talk to each other through squeaks, squeals, and other low-frequency sounds that humans can only hear through special instruments. Most ichthyologists – scientists who specialize in sea kitten biology – agree that this is just about the cutest thing ever.” They capped off the insanity by asking jam band Phish to rename themselves “Sea Kittens”. Phish was presumably too stoned to respond. The campaign didn’t resonate with anyone. In fact, only 14,000 people signed the petition and considering that PETA’s membership is over 2 million (by their own numbers), that means that less than 1% of their own organization gave a shit about the campaign.

2. Feeding kids meat is child abuse

News stories made it sound like poor 14-year-old Alexander Draper ballooned to 555-lbs because his mother, Jerri Gray, fed him like a goose being prepared for foie gras. It put him at risk for serious health problems – including potentially needing a liver transplant – and caused a lot of angry talk radio listeners to call in and rant about the disintegration of America. Not wanting to miss an opportunity to cash in on someone’s misfortune, PETA launched an ad campaign that blamed the obesity epidemic on meat. Most of the mouth-frothing died down when interviews with Gray showed that Draper’s obesity was partially due to poverty. Gray worked an astronomical amount of hours to make ends meet and simply did not have time to cook. She brought fast food home because it was affordable and time saving. PETA responded by sending her a copy of Meatless Meals for Working People, a book that mostly contains lists of vegetarian items one can select at fast food places.

3. Westminster Kennel Club dog show protest

Someone at PETA sat up and said: “Hey, we haven’t pissed off anyone lately, what can we do that is terribly offensive?” The result was a bizarre protest at the 133rd annual Westminster Kennel Club dog show where protesters dressed as the KKK. You see, according to PETA’s logic, selective dog breeding is equivalent to the white supremacist ethnic purity stance that the KKK espouses. Protesters stood outside the show handing out leaflets, carrying signs, and generally being pleasant, except for dressing as one of the most violent and intolerant groups in history. Admittedly, some dog breeding can produce unpleasant and painful effects for the dogs in question, but the AKC doesn’t burn crosses or lynch mutts in the street for being impure. Fortunately for the forces of logic, no one seemed to get the point of the protest. According to the AP: “Most passers-by seemed more puzzled than offended”. In the end, no one really paid attention to the protesters, except as interesting curiosities, and PETA failed not only to spread awareness or help the cause of purebred dogs, but they failed to piss anyone off significantly.

4. Cooking Mama

Cooking Mama is your typically bizarre (yet fun) Nintendo game where the player “cooks” various meals using the Nintendo DS’s touch screen. The stylus is used to move objects around, chop veggies, and slice meat. PETA thought that the fun, E-rated game would be a great platform to protest eating meat from, so they released a Flash version of the game called Cooking Mama: Mama Kills Animals where the player prepares a turkey by plucking feathers, ripping out innards, and cutting its head off. The insane PETA version of the game is a lot more fun than the original, possibly because there is something viscerally exciting about tearing the insides out of a turkey and then eating it. Response to the “unauthorized” version of the game was small, limited only to gaming sites trying to figure out what PETA was trying to accomplish. Once again, people seemed more bemused and uncertain than shocked and offended by PETA’s actions, so it once again begs the question: what was PETA was trying to accomplish?

5. NASCAR chicken dance

NASCAR is an event best left alone unless you have a mullet. Its fans are strange, its appeal is… evasive, but thankfully it is mostly avoidable outside of certain sites beneath the Mason-Dixon line. That’s why the rest off the world ignores it when NASCAR fans attempt to break the world record for something. Unless, of course, you’re PETA, in which case, you protest it with vigor. KFC sponsored an attempt to break the world record for most people chicken dancing at a 2009 event at the Talledega Speedway. PETA immediately took issue with this harmless event. The reason? Failure to adopt “even modest human reforms” with regards to the care and treatment of KFC’s chickens. You would think that someone at PETA would have realized that protesting KFC directly would have been a better idea than a high-profile attack on a large event that was barely related to chickens to begin with. Again, no one really paid attention to the protest. NASCAR: 1, KFC: 0.

6. Holocaust on Your Plate

Unless you are a Holocaust denier, member of 4chan, or 4chan member who also happens to be a Holocaust denier, joking about the Holocaust is considered off limits. That is unless, you guessed it, you are PETA. They thought it would be appropriate to compare the raising and slaughter of farm animals to this rather unpleasant event in human history. While there are a thousand appropriate ways to make the comparison, PETA went balls to the wall inappropriate: PETA toured a giant display that consisted of eight 60-square-foot panels where chickens, cow, and pig carcasses were juxtaposed with photos of Holocaust victims. Genius. Once again, this action produced little but a resounding “What the fuck?” from the community at large, and several pissed off statements from Jews and actual Holocaust survivors.

7. Obama’s fly swat

In mid-2009, Obama swatted down a fly during an interview with CNBC. “That was pretty impressive, wasn’t it? I got the sucker,” Obama riffed. Not even Birthers found issue with the event outside of the press fawning over his lighting fast reflexes. A few blogs decided that this was something PETA had to do something about. Falling for the troll bait, PETA found it inexcusable. They declared it an “execution” and demanded that Obama show a little more compassion to even “the least sympathetic animals.” The declaration largely became fodder to make fun of PETA so they backpedaled a bit and released the following statement: “In a nutshell, our position is this: He isn’t the Buddha, he’s a human being, and human beings have a long way to go before they think before they act.” They then sent him a “humane” flytrap.

8. WoW seal clubbing

World of Warcraft can quickly turn into a grinding process to level up and generally become a neckbeard. Players find inventive ways to combat the boredom and entertain themselves such as raiding in game funerals. One of the most popular pastimes is slaughtering a server’s wildlife for shits and giggles. A few Canadian players decided to host an in game seal hunt and PETA flipped a wig when they found out about it. While the slaughter of actual seals is frowned upon by the general public because baby seals are adorable, WoW seals aren’t real so no one really cares if they are attacked. So instead of directly protesting groups that club seals in Canada, PETA decided to raid the event because it would somehow open the eyes of Canadians who supported the killing of cute pups. Again, no one really seemed to care.

9. PETA’s lobster nightmare

Only poor coastal Americans ate lobster before lobster houses started opening up in-land. Americans couldn’t boil enough of the little crustaceans and fishermen almost wiped out the population to meet demand. These days, the “poor man’s chicken” enjoys a gourmet status and is often used in fundraisers, much like the one that the Child and Family Resources holds each year. In 2009, PETA arranged for the Child and Family Resources to use the “humane” $3,500 CrustaStun, which electrocutes the lobsters in less than a second. They flew in the inventor and generally acted smug until disaster struck: the machines didn’t arrive in time so the agency decided to boil the 1,800 lobsters instead. “It’s a total nightmare,” said a spokesperson for PETA.

You might also like the following:

• 7 Unbelievably Vain Historic Figures
• 10 Instrumental Innovations That Didn’t Change the World
• The Eastern honey bee bakes attacking hornets to death
• 8 Popular Pirates Who Were Actually Huge Losers
• 5 Geniuses Who Were Massive Assholes

Every once in a while an instrument comes along that changes the way people listen to music. The electric guitar, pioneered in the 1930s, paved the way for rock and roll. The synthesizer made the piano portable and interesting, at least to the 80s. Other musical innovations have been less success. The following are 10 musical instruments that made the world collectively shrug and say, “Meh”.

1. Theremin

Originally developed as a Russian government project to study proximity sensors, the theremin did away with all the pesky touching that plagued traditional instruments. Instead, you wave your hands around its two antennae as it makes a sound like a ghost beckoning you towards the light. Named after its inventor, Léon Theremin, the instrument never stood a chance. Aside from being difficult to play, it made its premiere in the United States in the eve of the Great Depression, a time when most people were more interested in slightly-used bread.

2. Terpsitone

Determined maintain his dominance in the space-age ghost music niche, Leon Theremin outdid himself with the terpsitone. Noting the naturally dance-like movements required to play the theremin, he created an instrument that basically amounted to Dance Dance Revolution for contortionists. You play a terpsitone by dancing on a metal plate. In turn, the terpsitone responds to every single movement of your body. Its hypersensitivity made it virtually impossible to play, which resulted in virtually nobody playing it. Only one of the original terpsitones that Theremin created still exists.

3. Waterphone

The most successful instrument on the list, the waterphone was invented by the appropriately named Richard Water. It has been featured in a few soundtracks but has otherwise failed to attract a large following. This may be because it puts out hideous sounds that can be described as a hybrid of a whale call and chalkboard screech. The waterphone features numerous tonal rods and a resonator that can be filled with water to help create sounds which are, in the words of its creator, “schiziosonic”. Schiziosonic is, of course, derived from combining the latin for “sound” and “bat shit insane.”

4. Katzenklavier

Basically Jingle Cats for sadists, the katzenklavier was a conceptual instrument that German scholar Athanasius Kircher first described in the 1650s. His idea was to pen a few hapless cats, arranged by the pitch of their meows, and then using a piano keyboard to drive spiked hammers into the tails of the cats, thus forcing them to yowl out their beautiful melodies. While a working version was never constructed, German physician Johann Christian Reil thought the katzenklavier would be brilliant or focusing the attention of the mentally ill, because nothing says sanity like torturing cats.

5. Glass Armonica

When he wasn’t busy courting young French women, Benjamin Franklin was inventing things. He enjoyed the sound produced by rubbing his fingers over glass cups so much that he invented the glass armonica in 1762 to do just that. It consisted of 37 rotating glass hemispheres arranged by pitch, which sounded when the player rubbed moistened fingers over them. It was popular enough for a time that Mozart wrote two pieces for it and Beethoven included it in one of his. Unfortunately, it fell from popularity when players began complaining that the glass armonica caused them mental distress, possibly due to lead in the glass hemispheres.

6. Light-Beam Piano

Edwin Welte was the Howard Hughes of piano manufacturers. Slightly eccentric, he pioneered the design of the mechanical piano and then turned his attention to the light-beam piano. It made music by flashing beams of light through grooved glass disks. This wasn’t enough, so Welte arbitrarily added giant horns on top. The resulting instrument started with the disadvantage of a synthesizer’s need for electricity, combined it with the portability of a dead whale, and added the looks of a deformed pipe organ. It never caught on, because like the theremin, the light-beam piano debuted during the Great Depression.

7. Amplified Cactus

Take an average, everyday potted cactus, hook up some contact microphones and, presto, instant musical instrument. The amplified cactus is one of a cornucopia of plant-based instruments ranging from carrot trumpets to cabbage slide whistles, but it outdoes the rest by not even bothering to imitate a traditional musical instrument. The amplified cactus is played by plucking its sharp, needle-like spines, which, unless they draw blood, produce barely audible clicks of noise.

8. Doulophone

What do you get when you make an instrument out of drainpipe and copper tubes? The doulophone, a plus-sized, melody-impaired monstrosity. The doulophone is an ensemble instrument which lacks any means of picking out a melody. Instead, it is meant to add “texture” to its more competent companion instruments, in much the same way that farting adds “texture” to dinner conversation. In reality, it mostly drones along, obscuring the music of instruments which are not made out of leftovers from your dad’s last home repair efforts.

9. Electronic Bagpipe

Because the world loved normal bagpipes so much, someone decided to grace music lovers everywhere with an electronic version. The electronic bagpipe combines the lovable caterwauling of regular bagpipes with the atonal horror of computer error beeps. There are at least six (yes, six!) different commercial models available. Out of those models, only one looks anything like a normal bagpipe, making the rest unfortunately easy to smuggle into unsuspecting audiences.

10. Moaning Lisa

Unlike the theremin, this is one instrument you definitely have to touch. The Moaning Lisa is a very busty, very naked mannequin-shaped instrument that can be “played” in much the same way that a blow-up doll can be “loved.” It features six strategically placed sensors on the neck, nipples, butt, and crotch of the mannequin, which when properly tweaked, fondled, and caressed bring the Moaning Lisa to an orgasmic orchestral crescendo.

You might also like the following:

• 9 Retarded PETA Stunts
• 7 Unbelievably Vain Historic Figures
• Want to hang out with terrible bands?
• The Eastern honey bee bakes attacking hornets to death
• 7 Alleged Sex Offenders

Apocalypticism, the belief that the world will end soon, is found in practically every religion on the planet. The Romans were periodically gripped by panics involving the prophesied downfall of Rome throughout their history, and early Christians believed they were living in the End Times with as much zeal as modern American evangelists. The following are 10 doomsday cults that still exist.

1. The Panacea Society

In 1792, part-time fortune teller Joanna Southcott started collecting “divine revelations” and had them sealed in a box with strict instructions to open it only for Jesus. Her followers called themselves Southcottians and were mostly early-19th century Spiritualists. Southcott dramatically announced that she was pregnant with the messiah, Shiloh, whose birth would kill all but her followers. However, Southcott was a 64-year-old virgin who showed no signs of pregnancy. To Southcott’s credit, she began doubting her beliefs when she failed to give birth but died before she was able to do anything about it. The sudden power vacuum among the Southcottians brought out all sorts of leadership, all of whom claimed they could psychically communicate with Southcott’s box, and transformed the Southcottians into a bizarre cult that refused to bury Southcott’s corpse, believing that she would be resurrected. They renamed themselves the Panacea Society under the belief that they had healing powers, and still believe that Shiloh will descend from heaven to reboot the world at a later date. The Panacea Society spends most of its time issuing press releases in British newspapers demanding that the bishops of the Church of England assemble to open Southcott’s box, presumably because Jesus is too busy.

2. The Church Universal and Triumphant

In 1957, traveling salesman Mark Prophet founded The Summit Lighthouse to teach the way of the Ascended Masters. According to him, Ascended Masters are individuals who have acquired enough worldly knowledge to attain immortal souls. Most of his original followers were nice old ladies who liked the idea of immortality, but membership exploded through the New Age self-help seminar circuit. Things became a bit bizarre after Prophet died in 1973. His wife, Elizabeth, co-opted a large portion of the followers and founded the Church Universal and Triumphant. She started referring to herself as Guru Ma, claimed that the world’s elite were malevolent aliens, and moved the organization to a remote Montana ranch patrolled by armed guards. There, members are forced into celibacy and aren’t allowed to eat chocolate (it was created by aliens). In the ’90s, Elizabeth made headlines by announcing that the alien elite would wage an nuclear war that would kill all but her followers. Cult members constructed the world’s largest fallout shelter and began stockpiling arms in preparation. When nothing happened, Elizabeth denied ever setting a date and claimed that she was merely warning the world. The Church continues to collect weaponry and upholds that the alien elite will wage their war on a future date.

3. The Jehovah’s Witnesses

In 1875, Charles Taze Russell, the son of a wealthy haberdasher, used his wealth to inform as many people as possible that the Armageddon would take place in 1878. 1878 passed without a blip but Russell was unphased: he simply created an organization which transformed into the Jehovah’s Witnesses and issued another date. Russell taught that Jesus had secretly been enthroned in heaven in 1914 and will return after the Armageddon, which only Jehovah’s Witnesses will survive. After ruling for 1,000 years, Jesus will return to heaven with the most righteous 144,000 souls. The remaining Jehovah’s Witnesses need not worry as they’ll get to enjoy paradise on Earth. Russell developed complicated algorithms to issue alerts about when Armageddon would occur and continued to do so even after the dates kept passing without anything happening. His death in 1916 didn’t seem to deter the organization from arbitrarily announcing a new date either. Jehovah’s Witnesses kept issuing dates until a mass walkout of members in 1976. Since then they’ve been reluctant to say when the Armageddon will occur, but still uphold that it can happen at any moment.

4. Takfir wal-Hijra

In 1971, agricultural engineer Shukri Mustafa joined a splinter of the Muslim Brotherhood called Takfir wal-Hijra (“Excommunication and Exodus”). His loose interpretation of Qur’anic verses involving the Apocalypse transformed the group into a cult that believes it is their right to conquer the Muslim world by any means because it has become too decadent. Takfir wal-Hijra believes that the end of the world will occur after the appearance of the Mahdi, an agent of God who will purify Islam. An epic battle between good and evil will kill all but the followers of Takfir wal-Hijra. Mustafa originally hinted that he was the Mahdi and declared that the end of the world was right around the corner. After Egypt hinted at peace with Israel, he took his followers to prepare in Egyptian caves. When nothing happened, he stated that cataclysmic destruction was required to bring the true Mahdi out of hiding and unleashed a program of terror in Egypt. Most of the group was killed by the Egyptian government fairly quickly. Mustafa was dead by 1978, and Takfir wal-Hijra has been operating in secret since. They were a massive influence on a young Ayman Al-Zawahiri, Al-Qaeda’s second in command, who took the concept of using violence to bring about Armageddon to heart.

5. Association for Research and Enlightenment

In 1902, insurance salesman Edgar Cayce began undergoing hypnosis to cure a bad case of laryngitis. He claimed to have discovered his underlying clairvoyant powers during these treatments and became one of history’s most influential psychics. Most of his early followers were Theosophists, but he became popular with the New Age movement in the ’60s and more recently with the History Channel whenever they’ve run out of Nostradamus shows. After a brief stint as a psychic healer, Cayce set up a nonprofit organization to shield himself from fortune telling laws and had a stenographer record 14,000 prophecies. His most dramatic prophecies involved “Earth Changes“, cataclysms brought on by the United States discovering a crystal powered Atlantean death ray in 1958. The Earth’s axis would shift, California would fall into the Pacific Ocean forever, and New York would be wiped out. Cayce died in 1945 and when nothing happened 1958, his followers associated atomic weapons with his Earth Changes prophecies. The Association for Research and Enlightenment, a modern incarnation of Cayce’s original organization, still studies his prophecies, hosts discussions over them, and occasionally releases cryptic warnings about the coming Earth Changes.

6. Aum Shinrikyo

In 1987, blind acupuncturist Shoko Asahara started a yoga class after visiting India. It attracted Japan’s educated elite at first, but quickly transformed into a rigid cult that called itself Aum Shinrikyo (“Supreme Truth”) as Asahara incorporated more occult teachings. Advertising campaigns announced that Asahara had attained enlightenment, was Jesus, and could cure everything from venereal diseases to brain cancer. Members were required to live on sparse compounds where children were forced into solitary confinement, had their eyebrows dyed green, and were forced to wear headgear that was designed to produce the same frequency as Asahara’s brainwaves. After a failed attempt to win 1990′s Japanese elections, Asahara began preaching that the Japanese government would wage a cataclysmic war with Aum Shinrikyo in 1997. Ever the altruist, he decided that it was Aum Shinrikyo’s duty to kill as many people as possible before the war since it relieved victims of bad karma. To make this happen the group manufactured Sarin and released it in crowded subways in 1995. Asahara was sentenced to be executed for the deaths of 11 people. Aum Shinrikyo has since reformed itself as Aleph and is under constant scrutiny from the Japanese government.

7. Raëlism

In 1974, sports journalist Claude Vorilhon renamed himself Raël and held a press conference to announce that he had been visited by benevolent aliens called Elohim. Vorilhon claimed that he had been tasked to save humanity from an impending nuclear holocaust. This “Age of Apocalypse” (not the X-Men arc) can only be averted if an interplanetary embassy is built in Israel. The Elohim will reveal themselves at this point and humanity will enter a new era of peace. Unfortunately, Israel won’t allow the embassy to be built because the swastika is prominently displayed in the Raëlism symbol. Raël claims he is from a long line of alien prophets which includes Muhammad, Jesus, and Buddha. He knows this for a fact because he visited them on another planet and they told him so. Although they’ve been cautious enough not to give an exact day for when the nuclear apocalypse will occur, Raëlians have hinted that not building the embassy by 2030 will yield massive destruction. When he isn’t saving humanity from the nuclear holocaust, Raël spends his time playing video games because racing exotic cars that wealthy members donated was too exhausting.

8. Falun Gong

In 1992, cereal factory guard Li Hongzhi started claiming he had godlike powers that allowed him to turn invisible, levitate, immobilize people, control the weather, and see into the future. This last power is especially important, because Li has seen that Fa-rectification, a cosmic process that reduces humanity to a pure state, will cause a “Great Havoc” soon. Li has developed a series of meditation techniques rooted in Taoism and Buddhism called Falun Gong to help mankind attain salvation in its time of need. It is spreading very quickly, there are an estimated 70 million Falun Gong practitioners in China alone. The Chinese government responded by banning the immensely popular religion under the argument that it has all the auspices of a dangerous cult. In 2003, Li announced that the SARS epidemic was the first wave of Fa-rectification. Falun Gong practitioners generally brush criticism aside, claiming that it is slander planted by the Chinese government.

9. Rastafarians

In the early-’30s, stories were published in Jamaican newspapers claiming that Emperor Haile Selassie I of Ethiopia was the leader of an East African possession cult known as the Nyahbinghi. These stories were fabrications written by Italian Fascists wanting to smear Selassie, but Jamaicans found them inspirational, and cults which venerated Selassie started appearing. The Rastafari movement developed out of this but didn’t have a central theology until 1933, when Leonard Howell returned after visiting the United States. Howell, a close friend of Marcus Garvey, distributed Afrocentric pamphlets that claimed Selassie was the messiah and was leading a war against western civilization, called Babylon. This struck a chord with Jamaicans who were weary of British rule. Howell never gave a date for the impending race war, but other Rastafari prophets were not as tight-lipped. Some preached that Jamaica would be torn apart in 1977 and that only Rastafarians would survive. Nothing happened and the Rastafarians fractured into various “mansions” who only share a belief in the evils of white society and the divinity of Selassie. Its modern form was brought to a worldwide audience through reggae music.

10. Brahma Kumaris World Spiritual University

In 1932, retired diamond dealer Lekhraj Khubchand Kripalani began claiming he was an avatar of Shiva and was receiving apocalyptic visions. He taught that a nuclear holocaust would destroy every continent except for the Indian subcontinent and quickly attracted a core group of 300 followers. Only they would be equipped to lead after the genocide, and they would usher in a perfect paradise. Most of his early converts were wealthy wives who made celibacy oaths and pledged their fortunes to him. Pissed off families starting lobbying the Indian government to ban the group, forcing Kripalani to create the organization that eventually became the Brahma Kumaris. They operated in secret, lobbying foreign governments to recognize them and putting out meditation pamphlets, until they found a lucrative niche teaching meditation techniques to the New Age movement. The Brahma Kumaris exploded across the planet until Kripalani died in 1969, leaving behind strict instructions that he would send messages through the Kumari leadership. The Brahma Kumaris still teach that a great destruction is right around the corner. Their most famous adherent is Pratibha Patil, the current president of India, who in 2007 announced that she had received a message from Kripalani stating that a “great responsibility” was headed her way.

You might also like the following:

• 5 Disasters That Could Have Been Avoided
• 7 Unbelievably Vain Historic Figures
• 10 Historic Badasses (Who Never Hurt a Fly)
• 10 Flimsy Paranoramal Hoaxes Everyone Bought Into
• 8 Popular Pirates Who Were Actually Huge Losers

Vanity is a billion dollar industry. Together, cosmetic surgery, beauty conglomerates, and fashion houses create the fourth largest economy on the planet. Catering to human vanity isn’t a recent phenomenon though; Mesopotamian men spent hours with curling irons to create elaborate rings in their beards. The following 7 historic figures took the search for attractiveness to extremes that few have been able to match.

1. Dioscorides’ Mouthwash

Pedanius Dioscorides, an early Greek pharmacist, wrote that gargling with human urine whitened teeth, reversed leprosy, and cured the plague. The promise of white teeth was extremely popular with Roman aristocracy. Portuguese urine was rumored to whiten the best, and commanded exorbitant prices. Dioscorides’ mouthwash was popularized again under the Tudor dynasty, who expanded it to all forms of urine: Dog urine was thought to be a fountain of youth, horse urine was supposed to treat hair loss, and human urine was touted as the Viagra of the time.

2. Edward VI of England Popularizes the Codpiece

Under Edward VI of England‘s reign in medieval England, fashion dictated that nobles’ rank be matched by the size of their endowment. Aristocrats wore tunics that were designed to expose the genitals, and there was even a cottage industry devoted to making freakishly large flesh colored falsies for gentlemen who felt that they didn’t quite measure up. This became such a big issue that the young Edward passed a law banning any man below the rank of lord from displaying his “privy member and buttokkes“. As a result, the codpiece became popular among low ranking nobility.

3. Francis Galton’s Beauty Map

Sir Francis Galton was an eccentric inventor who pioneered work in various areas including polling, meteorology, and finger printing. Galton created a “beauty map” of the 18th-century British Isles to track where unattractive and attractive women resided. For record keeping, he used a machine that pricked a piece of paper. Women marked on the right hand side were attractive, while women on the left hand side were unattractive. After years of work, Galton announced that the least attractive women could be found in Aberdeen. He then devoted years to measuring the asses of African women to test a measurement device.

4. Elizabeth Báthory’s Beauty Secrets

17th-century Hungarian countess Elizabeth Báthory is one of history’s most notorious woman serial killers. She earned this dubious honor by acting like a Disney movie villain. Báthory was a vain woman who spent a large portion of her day staring at herself in the mirror and trying to turn back the ravages of time. When nothing worked, she turned to black magic. Specifically, she tortured and sacrificed young virgin girls. When authorities went to arrest her, the first thing they found was a starving young girl who had been drained of her blood. Many historians peg Báthory’s body count as high as 650.

5. Elizabeth I of England’s Wig

Elizabeth I of England had the Anglican Church ban cosmetics and other vanities so women would not be subjected to questions ” of her majesty in marriage”. However, the threat of being burned at the stake as a witch didn’t curb her own vanity. Elizabeth’s ladies in waiting spent every morning tracing her veins with blue dye, powdering her until she was a pale white, and smothering her with a lead based skin whitening cream called Venetian Ceruse. Her extensive use of it, coupled with smallpox, caused her hair to fall out, forcing her to wear her now iconic wig. Elizabeth also favored dresses that exposed her breasts, the fashion of her youth, well into her 70s.

6. Cleopatra’s Stinky Beauty Secret

While Cleopatra VII Philopator would be considered homely by modern standards, she was considered an exotic beauty by Roman aristocrats. She famously smuggled herself into Caesar’s bedroom, where he was immediately enraptured with her. Cleopatra made history by deftly using her looks and her way with words to ensure that debt-strapped Egypt enjoyed a cordial relationship with Rome. The secret to her beauty? Crocodile dung (also used as a contraceptive at the time) and donkey milk face masks. The price of live crocodiles, to produce the dung, skyrocketed when Roman women learned about her technique.

7. Liberace’s Eyelids

Liberace was the highest paid entertainer in the world even while Elvis and the Beatles were at the peak of their popularity. His wealth allowed Liberace the vanity to indulge in plastic surgery, which was just starting to come into vogue with aging Hollywood celebrities. Liberace was so vain that he forced a lover to get plastic surgery so that his face looked the singer’s. Liberace reputedly had so much work done on himself that he was unable to close his eyes after his final face lift. He was reduced to spending his final years using eye-drops throughout the night to keep his eyeballs from drying out.

Edit: Used the wrong picture for Elizabeth Báthory! Whoops!

You might also like the following:

• 15 Famously Filthy People From the Pages of History
• 10 Incidents of Cannibalism
• 10 Historic Badasses (Who Never Hurt a Fly)
• 7 Badass Vikings
• 6 (Literally) Retarded Monarchs

Some disasters are unavoidable. Hurricanes, earthquakes, meteor strikes: only mad scientists are blamed for these mishaps. Sometimes fate decides to go ahead and give people a good spanking just for shits and giggles. Other times, its our own damn fault.

1. The Great Smog of 1952

The Disaster:

On December 5, 1952, London’s fog, tired of being the butt of many a British joke, got serious. On that particularly cold morning, London’s fog teamed up with vehicle exhaust, factory and power plant emissions, and smoke from coal-fired furnaces to sink London in a noxious haze for the next four days. The smog was so intense that it brought traffic to a standstill, closed schools, ruined an opera and several sporting events, and acted as cover for numerous intrepid robbers and thieves. Oh, it also killed an estimated 12,000 people.

What happened?

One of the instigators for the smog was the sooty diesel fumes from London’s brand new buses. Earlier that year that the city had brilliantly replaced their system of electric, pollution-free streetcars with smoke-belching, people-killing buses. Fortunately, when visibility fell to a foot in parts of London, the smog put a stop to the antics of these bright, shiny death-wagons. The largest contributors to the smog, however, were probably coal-fired furnaces. In a stroke of genius, the people of London hunkered down and kept the home fires burning brighter than ever. If they had put on coats and threw a few extra blankets on the bed, they probably could have kept from killing their neighbors.

2. The Draining of Lake Peigneur

The Disaster:

Lake Peigneur (pronounced pen-your) was a shallow, unassuming lake in southern Louisiana until November 21, 1980. It was on this day that the 11-foot-deep lake became vain and swallowed two enormous oil derricks, 11 barges, a tugboat, 70 acres of an island, and an impressive portion of the Gulf of Mexico. All of this was sucked down a whirlpool that reached a quarter mile in diameter, forcing water that normally flowed towards the Gulf down a 12 mile canal to flow backwards. In what would have been an engineering masterpiece, had it been intentional, Lake Peigneur was permanently transformed from a shallow fresh water lake into a 1,300-foot-deep inland sea in only three days.

What happened?

The disaster began when a Texaco oil rig accidentally drilled into a salt mine beneath the lake. Texaco was fully aware of the mines location and had intended to drill in a different part of the lake. Unfortunately, none of their employees could read a map and proceeded to rip a hole right through the top of the mine. When water began to pour in, it (unsurprisingly) began dissolving all the salt in the mine causing it to collapse rapidly. The collapse of the mine created a feedback loop of destruction: water entered the mine causing the salt to dissolve, causing the mine to collapse, causing the hole to grow wider, allowing more water in… By some miracle of fate, none of the oil riggers, salt miners, or tugboat crewmen died in this moment of glaring idiocy.

3. The Manila Garbage Slide

The Disaster:

The 15,000 residents of Promised Land had it bad. Despite their settlement’s cheery name, they lived in a disease-ridden shantytown wedged between Manila, the capital of the Philippines, and a gigantic garbage dump that really would have looked like the Promised Land to Oscar the Grouch. Their luck finally changed on July 10, 2000, for the worse, when the world decided to take a dump on them. After being buffeted for several days with heavy rain, the 50-foot high mountain of garbage that towered above Promised Land engulfed the shantytown, killing at least 234 people, and displacing many more.

What happened?

The way Manila approaches garbage disposal leads one to believe that its sanitation duties were in the hands of Captain Planet’s nemesis Sly Sludge. The government was aware that the landfill was already overfull by 1993. It was ordered closed in 1998, but it remained in use, even after a smaller garbage slide destroyed 32 homes in 1999. In November, 2000, only a few months after the dump’s deadly collapse, the city reopened the dump without even bothering to finish recovering the dead from the garbage.

4. The Bradford Sweets Poisoning

The Disaster:

On October 23, 1858, William “Humbug Billy” Hardaker, sold peppermint lozenges to the good people of Bradford, England, as he usually did. This particular Saturday he had the good luck to buy his batch of mints at discount because of their substandard appearance. By the time he fell sick that afternoon, he had sold enough lozenges to satisfy some 200 peoples’ sweet tooth. The next day, still ill, Hardaker had to explain to the police why everyone who ate his candy was either getting sick or dying.

What happened?

Joseph Neal, who sold Humbug Billy his peppermints, regularly replaced expensive sugar with the much cheaper and less tasty “daft” which could consist of just about any white powder from plaster of Paris to gypsum or limestone. Neal had sent one of his assistants to a druggist’s to buy some daft. The druggist’s assistant got the daft, or more correctly, he got arsenic which he thought was daft. Despite the fact that the lozenges made with arsenic looked notably odd and the fact that one of his employees fell sick while making the candies, Neal saw no reason not to sell them. Neither did William Hardaker, who also fell ill after tasting the not-so-sweet sweets. The carefree use of non-food ingredients and selling of obviously questionable candies lead to the death of 20 people and the non-lethal poisoning of another 200 or so.

5. The Boston Molasses Flood

The Disaster:

January 15, 1919, was an unusually warm day in Boston. It was also the day a 2 million gallon tank of molasses on top of a rum distillery exploded, pouring a 10-foot-high wave of molasses through the city’s streets at a whopping 35 mph. This wave of syrupy death managed to shove a building from its foundation, demolished a section of elevated train track, all the while killing 10 horses, 21 people, and, for the hell of it, injuring another 150. Problems didn’t stop there. It took 4 days to recover all the victims of the spill as the thick molasses made it almost impossible to move through the affected areas. Then came the cleaning effort, which involved massive amounts of salt water from the Atlantic Ocean and a lot of pumps to get the molasses out of people’s basements.

What happened?

Although the United States Industrial Alcohol Company, which owned the offending molasses tank, tried to pin the flood on crazy anarchist bombers, the likely culprit in the disaster was simple negligence. Coincidentally, the day after the disaster, the 18th Amendment, which initiated Prohibition, was ratified. On January 16th, 1920, it went into effect, a year too late to save the people of Boston. Had Prohibition begun earlier the distillery, no longer being able to legally make rum, would have had little reason to keep such a deadly amount of molasses sitting idly on its roof.

Bonus: Hurricane Andrew

Few would argue that Hurricane Andrew, which ravaged the Bahamas, Florida, and Louisiana in 1992 was avoidable. Few, that is, except for Imelda Marcos, the wife of former Filipino dictator Ferdinand Marcos. After her husband’s death, the Philippine government refused to allow his body to reenter the country for burial. Imelda, a woman most famous for her massive collection of shoes, claimed that in response his restless spirit caused Hurricane Andrew and numerous other natural disasters.

You might also like the following:

• 10 Whacked-Out Despots
• 10 Historic Badasses (Who Never Hurt a Fly)
• 10 Doomsday Cults
• 8 Popular Pirates Who Were Actually Huge Losers
• 7 Unbelievably Vain Historic Figures