It’s not exactly a startling, ground-breaking revelation to suggest that the Vikings were pretty much the most face-rockingly hardcore bastards to ever beat a bunch of monks to death with their own iron church bells, throw them through a stained-glass window onto some pointy rocks, and carry off all of their valuable artifacts. We all know that these psychotic, axe-wielding Norsemen are more or less the epitome of everything it means to be tough as hell, what with their looting and pillaging and huge beards and all, but it never really hurts to drive home the point every once in a while that these guys totally kicked ass.

So, in order to promote the release of my new book BADASS: A Relentless Onslaught of the Toughest Warlords, Vikings, Samurai, Pirates, Gunfighters, and Military Commanders to Ever Live, I’ve been given the opportunity to write a list of badass Vikings for my friends here at ty.rannosaur.us. As the exceedingly-lengthy title of the book would imply, there are a couple of Vikings described within the pages. I discuss King Harald Hardrada of Norway and the anonymous Viking at Stamford Bridge, but there are so many other great stories of sea-raiding warlords that qualify as righteous, jugular-rending badasses. Here are some of their stories.

1. Rurik

The Viking nobleman known as Rurik, which I’m told is apparently some utterly-bastardized derivative of the name Hroerkr somehow, was a massive, badass, face-smashing Norseman who terrorized the countryside with his freakalicious murderous rampages, plundered with a high degree of impunity, and enthusiastically destroyed all who opposed him. As that sort of mayhem, while pretty righteous, generally isn’t the sort of thing that would set him apart from his fellow medieval Norsemen, he is also now widely credited with inventing the country of Russia, which is pretty sweet.

Back in the 9th century the Vikings were having a blast sailing their totally rad dragon-headed longships down the twisting waterways of present-day Russia, cruising around and stopping every so often to bludgeon the holy living bejeezus out of anything stupid enough to be situated on waterfront property and steal anything more valuable than a pile of dirt. Their basic m.o. was to plunder, incinerate, slaughter people, gank all their valuables, and then sell the captured slaves, furs, and honey off to Constantinople for a one-hundred percent profit. While this is a pretty excellent business plan on the part of these forward-thinking bloodthirsty pillagers, it turns out that the Slavic peoples of Russia weren’t huge fans of this rather one-sided arrangement. So, one day the citizens of the wealthy trading city of Novgorod went up to a our friend Rurik – a guy who had been a pretty notorious plunderer and sea-raider in his own right – and asked him to use his powers of crotchal annihilation to protect them from his berserker brethren. Rurik jumped at the chance to make an assload of gold running a cushy medieval protection racket, and moved right in to the babe-filled hut the Novgorodians had prepared for him.

Rurik lived the good life for a while, but eventually got bored of everyone fawning over him and paying him tribute to keep them safe so went back to Scandinavia to resume his old life of drinking mead and freezing his balls off like a good Norseman. The Novgorodians went out and recruited another Viking to serve as their minister of defense, but that guy was a totally incompetent douchebag, so they fired him and went back to ask Rurik to return. Rurik told them he was kind of busy with the ball-freezing and all, but when the people of Novgorod promised him more gold than he could pack into a rented U-Haul, he decided he could probably take a little bit of time out of his day to return to Russia and rule as the Defense Minister of Novgorod.

Unfortunately for our boy Hroerkr/Rurik, when he got back to Novgorod in 862 he didn’t find the piles of gold and babes that had been promised him. Of course, his natural reaction was to freak out and start setting stuff on fire and swear that he would never stop killing people until his demands were met. A Novgorodian nobleman named Vadim rode out with an army to try and placate Rurik by smashing him in the face with a sword a few bajillion times, but Rurik crunched that dillhole’s balls into paste, destroyed the Novgorodian Army, and seized complete and total control over aspects of Novgorodian life. So by flipping out like a bearded ninja, Rurik had essentially upgraded his position from Public Safety Official to Iron-Fisted Autocrat. Rurik and his descendents would continue to conquer territory, annex lands, and dominate the country as merciless tyrants for seven hundred years – a dynasty of neck-punching Tsars that would finally end with a dude named Ivan the Terrible. Now there’s a legacy you can be proud of.

2. Ivar the Boneless

Ivar the Boneless was just one in a long line of excellently-epitheted Viking badasses. The son of Ragnar Hairy-Breeches, and brother of Sigurd Snake-in-the-Eye and Bjorn Ironside, Ivar invaded England in the 860s to avenge the exceedingly brutal murder of his somewhat-misguided but unquestionably-manly father. Apparently, the Hairy-Breeched One had got some crazy notion in his head that he was such a mega flaming hardass that he could conquer all of Great Britain with an invasion force consisting of just two longships and his own apparently-raging testosterone production glands. This was a plan that, not surprisingly, backfired somewhat spectacularly. Ragnar’s laughably-puny force was annihilated out of hand by the Northumbrians, and their King, a total jerkburger named Aella, captured Ragnar and executed him Bond-villain style by throwing him into an elaborate pit filled with hundreds of venomous snakes. I’d say that this “totally bit ass”, but that would be really cheesy and I am simply above those sorts of groan-inducingly terrible puns, no matter how hilarious they may or may not be.

Upon hearing about the gruesome, untimely demise of his poor hair-covered dad, Ivar did what any face-cleaving Viking son would have done and swore bloody delicious vengeance on King Aella of Northumbria. He crash-landed his ships on the shores of England at Mach 3.5, looted East Anglia, captured York, and destroyed any armies dumb enough to stand between him by headbutting their skulls out the backs of their faces.

I should mention that Ivar the Boneless got his sweet nickname because he had a degenerative disease that left him unable to stand, and not because he needed to talk to his doctor about Cialis or anything like that. However, as a badass medieval sea-raiding shitwrecker, Ivar wasn’t going to let a little thing like “not being able to use his legs” stop him from raining death on his enemies at every turn. All Norse kings were expected to do battle with the men, and Ivar did this in a most excellent manner – he had his men carry him around on his shield, and he fired his longbow from a seated position. I think we can all agree that this pretty much kicks ass. I should probably mention that there’s still some debate among scholars as to whether this version of events is accurate, but I think it is awesome and I really really want it to be true, so I’m just going to roll with it.

Either way, Ivar the Boneless shattered the spines of his opponents, slaughtered the Northumbrian Army, captured King Aella, and ritualistically eviscerated him by chopping open his ribcage with an axe, pulling out his still-pulsating lungs, and leaving him to die a slow, painful, unconstitutionally-cruel-and-unusual death. Ivar had so much fun putting Aella out of his misery in this manner that he later went out and did the same thing to King Edmund of East Anglia, putting the “martyr” in “St. Edmund the Martyr.” Ivar also captured Northumbria, Mercia, and much of Anglia, headed out to Ireland, beat up some Celts, conquered Dublin, and subsequently died of some mysterious illness. With his quest for bloody vengeance complete, I guess he had nothing left to live for.

3. Rollo the Dane

Rollo the Dane, also known as Rollo the Viking, Rollo the Norseman, and Rollo the Homicidal Psychopath, was a gigantic axe-swinging maniac who was a trailblazing pioneer in the timeless art of amphibiously invading the Normandy coast. It was way back in the year 885 that Rollo – a man whose name isn’t really Rollo (he changed it to Robert after he was baptized), and who may not even have been a Dane (some people believe he was from Norway) – decided that he was really pissed off with the French for some reason I just can’t seem to figure out. As any Viking worthy of his animal hide loin cloth did when he flipped out and decided he needed to pulverize cities into grave dust with his junkbag, Rollo put together a fleet of 700 ships and led 30,000 bloodthirsty barbarian warriors on a balls-out invasion of the French countryside. The massive Viking armada plundered Northern France, captured Rouen, and headed down the Seine River in a six-mile-long convoy of longboats, axes, colorful shields, burning villages, and wild out-of-control beards. Eventually they reached Paris, and decided that they definitely needed to destroy that place, so they laid siege to it relentlessly over the course of thirteen months. Luckily for the medieval Parisians, the Vikings weren’t able to penetrate the unscalable city walls, and eventually Rollo and his associates got sick of waiting around and headed back home.

Well if there’s one thing Hagar the Horrible has taught us about the Vikings, it’s that they don’t just give up and start crying into their ale simply because they spent over a year of their lives bashing their heads into an impenetrable network of heavily-reinforced stone walls and getting assorted food products thrown at them by their toxic harpy wives. Rollo returned in 911 with another equally-impressive army of bloodlusting berserkers, and this time they were even more cantankerous than they’d ever been before. The assault force plundered the countryside, razed cities, and destroyed everything they could get their hands on, and it looked like nothing was going to stop them in their mad desire to incinerate every living person and torch all the inanimate objects in the Frankish Kingdom.

Despite his unfortunate name, it’s obvious that the Frankish King Charles the Senseless apparently wasn’t a complete raging moron. This famously-moronic ruler did see the benefit of not being hewn into tiny pieces, so he came out and offered Rollo a huge tract of land on the French coastline to rule as his own as long as he promised to stop killing, plundering, and disemboweling French people. Rollo was down with this agreement, and spared Paris once again. He moved in to the coastal area near the conquered city of Rouen, and renamed the area Normandy. Rollo and the Vikings would remain in this area for generations, and Rollo’s descendant – William the Conqueror – would go on to stomp faces across the Channel, invading Britain, defeating the Saxons, and taking over as King of England in 1066. I talk about William in the book, but the short version of the story is that he was awesome.

4. Egil Skallagrimsson

Egil was a psychotic, super-aggravated Icelandic warrior skald with a massive, misshapen head that kind of resembled an eggplant. This hell-raising Juggernaut of Violence flipped out and went berserk on anything with a pulse pretty much every fifteen minutes, and never stopped swinging his axe around wildly until everyone within a ten-foot radius was missing at least one appendage. Egil killed his first man at age seven, and by the time he died of old age at 80 he had won nearly a hundred duels, fought in a dozen wars, plundered countless cities, and amassed a veritable fortune in plundered gold and silver.

Egil was known for his sunny disposition and his tendency to take a hatchet to anything he didn’t like, appreciate, or understand. Eventually, this got him on the wrong end of King Erik Bloodaxe of Norway, and while you and I would understand that you don’t want to screw with a man known as “Bloodaxe”, Egil was a fearless bastard who didn’t stop to consider things like epithets once his battle-rage took over and he started groin-shotting his enemies in the nards with a spear. King Bloodaxe voiced his frustration with Egil’s wacky antics by sending a raiding party out to kill him with swords, but this didn’t work out so hot – when Egil heard about the assassins, he turned his ship around, hunted THEM down, ambushed them in their camp, slaughtered all of them in combat, and stole all of their ships and plunder.

During his adventures pissing off everyone in Scandinavia, Egil placed a curse on the ruling family of Norway, burned down the home of a prominent noble, destroyed towns along the British coastline, killed a Scottish Earl in a battle, and survived an ambush by killing fourteen men by himself. He also fought a legendary berserker in a duel, and when they both smashed their swords and shields to pieces, Egil took the guy down like Lawrence Taylor destroying Joe Theisman on Monday Night Football and then tore out the dude’s jugular with his teeth. He was pretty serious.

Another interesting aspect of Egil Skallagrimsson is that he is considered to be one of the most eloquent warrior-poets of the Dark Ages, which is something you probably wouldn’t expect from a guy who spent most of his time cleaving people’s torsos in half with an axe. Of course, Egil was the kind of guy who tended to use his intelligence simply for his own advantage – one time he used a poem to convince his captors not to execute him, and in his numerous duels he routinely sang insulting, derogatory songs directed at his enemies in an effort to get them so pissed off that they would make mistakes – but his writings, as published in the Viking epic Egill’s Saga, are still studied today by many Scandinavian scholars and are held up as some of the most eloquent literature medieval Iceland has to offer. So that’s something.

5. Knut the Great

Knut was the second son of King Svein Forkbeard of Denmark and Queen Gunhild the Haughty, and grew up to become the “King of All the English, and of Denmark, and of the Norwegians, and Some of the Swedes,” which is quite honestly one of the greatest kingly titles ever devised by any human being living or dead. Trained from a young age in the fine art of bifurcating peoples’ brains with a battleaxe, Knut was raised in a secluded fortress and educated in the badass arts by some of Denmark’s toughest and most brutal Viking warriors – a skill that would serve him well in his career as a knut-smashing master of carnage.

In the year 1002, King Ethelred the Unready of England got really sick of these annoying Vikings raiding his towns and torching all of his subjects to death, so he decided to celebrate the obscure festival of Saint Brice’s Day by ordering the bloody massacre of all Danes living in England. Svein Forkbeard took quite a bit of umbrage with this decree, especially since his sister and brother-in-law spent the holiday being locked inside of a church and burned to death, so he decided to head over and show Ethelred the Unready that ordering a Viking genocide is kind of a bad idea… unless of course you enjoy having a broadsword rammed so far down your throat that you’re stapled to your own throne.

Knut, Svein, and the Viking army crushed Ethelred, who by definition was unready for the asskicking he so generously received, and when King Svein died a few years later Knut took over as the all-powerful ruler of England. Ethelred’s son Edmund Ironside got his panties in a wad about the whole thing and tried to re-take the throne from the Danish berserker, but Knut dragon-punched that jerkwad so hard that his decapitated head sailed across the channel, passed forward in time a few hundred years, and landed eye-first on the Eiffel Tower. Then he married the guy’s widow just to rub it in.

Special K’s first order of business was to exile, execute, and/or imprison all of Edmund Ironside’s relatives and supporters, mostly because it’s never a good idea to have people hanging around swearing blood oaths to avenge their friends’ deaths by stabbing you in the balls until you die from it. Then, despite the fact that this new King of England had come from a long line of people who made names for themselves by wading through knee-deep rivers of blood, Knut established a twenty-year period of unprecedented peace in England, where he went around to the different cities and counties building churches and merry-go-rounds and giving everybody high-fives. He ruled fairly and justly, and is now remembered as being a pious and holy man because he gave lots of gold to the Church, only assassinated people that deserved it, and only took good Christian women to be his mistresses. He later went back to the old country, took over the throne of Denmark, almost single-handedly turned back an invasion by the Norwegians, conquered Norway, annexed the parts of Sweden that he liked, and died at the age of 40.

6. Erik the Red

Erik the Red is famous for discovering Greenland, a feat he accomplished simply by being such a compete mega-bastard that he was exiled from every civilized nation in Scandinavia and had nowhere else to go. Erik was originally from Norway, but was exiled for having really loud parties, drunk-texting people pictures of his taint at two in the morning, and brutally murdering a bunch of Viking warriors who were pissing him off. No longer welcome in Norway, Erik – who was totally Metal to the extreme gonzo back at a time when metal was simply an implement for making weapons – got in his boat and headed West until he hit Iceland. The red-bearded Viking ass-wrecker hung out there for a while, but one day one of his jackass neighbors borrowed his lawn mower and forgot to return it in a timely manner, so Erik went out and killed him and his entire family with a broadsword. So, once again, Erik was banished, and once again he just got in a boat and headed west. This time he bumped into Greenland, which was really only a semi-mythical place at this point in history, so good for him for finding it.

It turns out that Greenland is actually just a gigantic hunk of inhospitable ice, but Erik had the good sense to name it Greenland because then he could potentially trick people into coming there. This worked out pretty well, and he eventually established a decent-sized Viking colony there, where ruled over the area as chieftain. This was a pretty good idea, considering how he was usually on the wrong side of the law, and my guess would be that one of his first acts as all-powerful ruler would have been to pull the trigger and legalize violent homicide as long as you can provide one good reason why the victim deserved a hatchet implanted in their brain.

Erik’s son was a guy named Leif the Lucky, who is the dude that’s nowadays credited with discovering North America. Leif had heard about all the success his father had simply getting in a boat, sailing west, and discovering things, so he decided he’d try his hand at aimlessly stumbling across the ocean in the general direction of the setting sun. As his name would imply, Leif got lucky and hit land. He called the place Vinland because it had wine, which he liked, but eventually Italians, Spanish, and Portuguese discovered it again and decided that Vinland was a stupid name so they changed it to America, which is way better.

7. Freydis Ericsdottr

Sure, Leif was cool and all, but if you want to talk about badass Vikings, you should really give a shout-out to his sister Freydis because she had an insane, vengeful penchant for slaughtering people with an axe that would have brought a single tear of manly joy to her old father’s cheek.

When Leif and his crew were looking for Canada, Freydis decided to tag along because Greenland was kind of a crappy hellhole and she didn’t really have a whole lot else going on at the time. It turns out that discovering new stuff isn’t quite as safe as it may seem, because not long after discovering Vinland, the Vikings realized that it was already inhabited by indigenous peoples, some of whom presumably had discovered the land even before Leif or the Portuguese had. The Vikings didn’t know what to call these crazy tomahawk-hucking natives, so they called them Skrellings, which was the default word the Norse used for pretty much anything they couldn’t identify. Well these Skrellings decided they weren’t huge fans of having Viking raiders patrolling their land, so they put together a war band and made a concerted attempt to forcibly evict Leif and his buddies by beating their faces in until they passed out and died face-down in a pool of their own blood.

So Leif and his homies were just chilling, when all of a sudden out of nowhere these Skrellings came flying in from every direction, attacking them with slings, axes, and strange exotic weapons the Vikings had never seen before. Many of the big ripped Viking warriors decided they didn’t want to fight demons or whatever the hell Skrelling people were and started hauling ass outta there at top speed.

As these big, bad Vikings were fleeing for their lives like horror movie vixens in high heels, only one of the Norsemen decided to make a stand and see whether or not these Skrellings were susceptible to conventional weapons – Freydis Ericsdottr. This hardcore Viking woman was pregnant, pissed off, and didn’t feel like running away from anything. She faced the fleeing Vikings and derisively shouted:

Why do ye run, stout men as ye are, before these miserable wretches, whom I thought ye would knock down like cattle? If I had weapons, methinks I could fight better than any of ye!

This pump-up speech went pretty much nowhere, and the Vikings didn’t even give a little stutter-step as they were rapidly fleeing from the oncoming Skrellings. Well, forget that. Freydis decided to show them she meant business. She grabbed a sword off a dead Viking, got super-psyched up about killing people, ripped open her shirt for some reason, and banged the sword against her chest Tarzan-style while screaming like a goddamned banshee. For the record, taking off your shirt and staring down an army of mysterious warriors by yourself is the definition of “tits-out”, which is like the estrogen-fuelled version of “balls-out”. The Skrellings saw this crazy chick daring them to screw with her and got so freaked out that they turned and fled. Freydis had saved the day, and proved that she had the biggest nuts of all the Vikings in the process.

But that’s not even the end of it. On a different expedition to Vinland, a couple total doucheheads bros were totally pissing her off, so she led a Viking raiding party out in the middle of the night to kill them and their families, steal all of their stuff, and bring it back to Greenland so she could sell it. When none of the Viking warriors in her party had the cojones required to kill the women, she sacked them in the groin with a steel-toed boot, grabbed an axe, and killed five women herself. She ended up taking a lot of heat for this stone-cold quintuple homicide once she got back to civilization, but it was totally worth it.

You might also like the following:

• 10 Badasses From the Pages of History
• 10 Historic Badasses (Who Never Hurt a Fly)
• 10 Historic Badasses (Ass-Kicking Edition)
• 8 Popular Pirates Who Were Actually Huge Losers
• 7 Unbelievably Vain Historic Figures

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
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• 10 Historic Badasses (Who Never Hurt a Fly)
• 7 Badass Vikings
• 6 (Literally) Retarded Monarchs

Anthropologist Dick Hebdige wrote that subcultures are identifiable through their fashions, mannerisms, and slang. They have a belief system that outsiders might not understand but is sacred in their own circles. Modern media has transformed how subcultures spread and has introduced scores of them to the general public. The following are 10 interesting subcultures which you may not have heard about yet.

1. Zapatistas

The Zapatista Army of National Liberation (Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional, EZLN) is an anti-globalization revolutionary militia that appeared in 1994 as a response to NAFTA. Most people know of them because their leader, Subcomandante Marcos, smokes a pipe while wearing a ski mask. The Zapatistas were eventually given some autonomy took over the eastern part Mexico’s poorest state, Chiapas. They’ve since developed a subculture that is an interesting amalgam of revolutionary imagery, Catholicism, and Maya-centrism. Posters of Che Guevara next to the Virgin Mary with epithets in a colloquial version of Spanish are fairly common. Subcomandante Marcos gives speeches with a rooster that he calls “el pingüino” (“the penguin”) because of its hobbling walk, which is supposed to symbolize the proletariat.

2. Bills

Spaghetti westerns about Buffalo Bill became incredibly popular with the poor youth of Léopoldville (now Kinsasha) in the late-’50s. Buffalo Bill struck a chord with the Congolese because his story was similar to tall tales about traditional hunter heroes. The most popular of these westerns was Pony Express, where Charlton Heston played Buffalo Bill. For nearly a decade, it was common to see Léopoldville youth walking around the city wearing cowboy kerchiefs, jeans, and 10 gallon hats and calling themselves “Bills”. They even developed their own language called Hindoubill, based on the misconception that the Indians in westerns were Hindus from India. Dressed up Bills started disappearing by the late-’60s after being absorbed into local gangs, but even modern gangs in Kinsasha still speak Hindoubill and brandish kerchiefs to show their allegiance.

3. Asgarda

In Histories, Herodotus discussed a war that the Greeks had with a group of woman archers who removed a breast to freely use a bow. These women were called the Amazons and were placed on boats after being defeated. They managed to escape, intermarried with the Scythians, and ended up in modern day Ukraine. The Asgarda claim to be contemporary extensions. Their origin is rooted in a recent Ukrainian movement to rediscover traditional martial arts but they splintered into an all-woman subculture that secluded in the Carpathian mountains. Asgarda practice a strict training routine that involves fist-fighting styles and medieval weaponry. Interviews with them read like issues of Wonder Woman, complete with ultra-feminist proclamations about the downfall of man’s society.

4. Rolingas

Uruguayan rock bands that pinched the sound and style of The Rolling Stones became popular in Argentina in the ’60s. They died out quickly but the bar bands they inspired in Buenos Aires cultivated a rabid following that coalesced into the Rolinga (“Rolling”) subculture. Rolingas are identifiable by their Polynesian cargo cult style deification of The Rolling Stones, Mick Jagger hair styles, and disdain for anything that isn’t Rolinga. They heavily borrow customs from soccer hooligans, so concerts are cramped affairs with chanting fans, giant flags with epithets, and the occasional streak of violence. Rolingas enjoyed a moment of popularity in 1995 when The Rolling Stones toured Argentina and invited a few Rolinga bands to open for them. It didn’t last long; a 2004 club fire caused a massive backlash towards Rolingas that pushed them back into the suburbs.

5. Burrnesha

The Kanuni i Lekë Dukagjinit, Albania’s code of conduct, describes women as a “sack made to endure” and gives all wealth to men. It also promotes blood feuds between men. This practice has often wiped out entire generations of men and left women with no claims over property and possessions. The Burrnesha subculture was created to solve this dilemma. Burrnesha sacrifice their femininity and live as men in Albania’s patriarchal society when no men of age are available in a family. They swear a vow of chastity before town elders, chop off their hair, and adopt male mannerisms. They are expected to drink heavily, chain smoke, and carry weapons. The subculture is slowly dying out in modern Albania as women claim more rights; only about 40 remain.

6. Raggare

Sweden is the land of Ikea and buxom blondes, right? It is also the land of the Raggare (loosely translates to “pick-up artist”), a subculture that idolizes 1950s American pop culture. Raggare listen to rockabilly, dress like James Dean from Rebel Without a Cause, and even speak Swedish with a Greaser twang. While they’re mostly seen as a noisy nuisance today, the Raggare caused a moral panic when they first appeared in the ’50s: who wouldn’t be shocked to see hundreds of young Swedes dressing and talking like the Fonz? They are best known for their large classic American cars. These can be seen lumbering around the streets of Sweden with scores of Raggare car surfing along. They also celebrate the Confederate Flag and peckerwood while being completely oblivious to the racist undertones of both.

7. Pokemones

Speaking of moral panics, the next one is a doozy. Ultraconservative Chile has recently been horrified at public orgies called ponceo. Ponceo operate like flashmobs: a Facebook bulletin or a series of tweets yields hundreds of Chilean youth in public parks. The difference is that these flashmobs involve androgynous bisexuals making out and giving each other blow jobs while Reggaeton blares in the background. The subculture that host these orgies are called Pokemones - so-called because their hairstyles resemble Pokemon characters – and are identifiable by their tight jeans, multiple piercings, brightly dyed hair, and thick eyeliner. The end result of the moral panic was people bashing Pokemones in public. The Chilean government sponsored an anti-violence campaign called “Foundation for a Better Future” as a result.

8. Goreans

If Scientology has proven anything, it is that some people will take bad science fiction too seriously. John Norman began writing sword and planet novels in the late-’60s about the medieval planet of Gor. The Gorean subculture is comprised of people claiming to live their lives by a creed laid out in Norman’s novels, where an insect race called the Priest-Kings have transplanted entire cultures to Gor. In the novels, it is populated by men who are as ripped as Conan the Barbarian and by Red Sonya-esque sex slaves, controlled by a rigid caste system. Before you get too excited, real world Goreans’ appearances tend to be disappointing. Over time, the Goreans have evolved into an entire BDSM subculture that enjoys cheesy science fiction. They are also extremely prevalent on Second Life due to their inherently nerdy nature.

9. Guro Lolitas

No one really knows why Japanese subcultures have a reputation of being slightly odder than the subcultures one would find in the rest of the world. Some argue that it is because people have to go to extremes in order to stand out in an extremely homogeneous population. But not even Japan was prepared for the Lolita subculture that took the country by storm in the ’70s. All of a sudden, thousands of young Japanese were dressing like Victorian aristocrats. It quickly reached a peak by the ’90s, and these days Lolita clothing can be found in practically every Japanese department store. So, it was only natural when Lolita subculture created its own subcultures. The most bizarre group is the Guro Lolita. Guro Lolita is devoted to dressing and acting like a broken doll. A typical Guro Lolita limps around, wears an eye patch, is covered in bandages, and blood splatters cover her clothes.

10. Wannarexics

Like all things, the pressure to be thin is taken to extremes on the internet. Pro-anorexia and pro-bulimia websites promote personified versions of the diseases named Ana (anorexia) and Mia (bulimia) in ways that mirror Greek cults. Central to these groups is the belief that anorexia and bulimia are lifestyle choices and not diseases. They are extremely wary of strangers because of the ongoing outrage surrounding their existence, and a subculture of people who are new to the groups has come into existence as a result. Wannarexics are viewed as crash dieters, and therefore less devoted to the cause, so they go to extremes to prove their worth. Wannarexics are extremely ephemeral because, unlike the larger pro-ana subculture, they are more likely to quit after hitting a target weight.

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Most of the stories we grew up hearing about Africans, Polynesians, and other “savages” eating colonists were exaggerated blood libels used to justify enslaving them. The following are 10 incidents of cannibalism. They delve into the cultures that practiced it, tell the stories of a few murdering cannibals, and also of some extreme situations where people were driven to eat their fellow man in order to survive.

1. Aghori

The Aghori are Hindu sadhus who believe immortality is attainable by spending 12 years bringing oneself closer to everything that is unclean in society. Most sadhus are content to roam around India smoking hash, but Aghoris smear themselves with cremation ash, drink wine and urine from human skulls, and practice cannibalism. They collect corpses that have been ceremonially disposed of by family members in the Ganges and consume them after praying. Aghoris believe that the proper combination of prayer and cannibalism gives them powers such as levitation and the ability to control weather.

2. Anyoto

Also known as the Human Leopard Society, the Anyoto was an 18th century West African secret society that practiced cannibalism. Each member had to murder a loved one to join, and had to provide a fresh victim every four years thereafter. They believed that a victim’s body fat allowed wishes to be granted. Members dressed in leopard skins and attacked travelers with weapons resembling a leopard’s claws and teeth. The flesh of victims was cut from the body, distributed to members, and consumed in a ceremony. Edgar Rice Burroughs based Tarzan’s Leopard Men on the Anyoto.

3. watuSimba

Today, watuSimba (were-lion) stories are used to scare misbehaving children. But in the ’40s, the watuSimba were young women who had been enslaved by East African witch doctors. They were forcefully addicted to drugs to make them compliant, forced to live in tight cages, and had their foot tendons reshaped to give them the gait of a stalking lion. The witch doctors would then send them out as assassins. The watuSimba wore the skin of a lion and were outfitted with prosthetic claws while hunting. Most shockingly, they were primarily fed the meat of their victims. They killed approximately 300 people over the course of four years and continued to kill even after the witch doctors were captured and hanged.

4. Fritz Haarmann

Fritz Haarmann‘s victims were young refugees that he picked up at train stations in a post-World War I Germany. Similar to the watuSimba, Haarmann killed by gnawing through the throats of his victims until they were decapitated. He then sold their flesh as horse meat, ate what he couldn’t sell, and disposed of the bones in the Leine. In 1924, Haarmann was caught and charged with 27 murders after some local boys discovered human skulls while fishing. He was Germany’s first experience with a serial killer and it was just their luck that he would also be history’s most prolific cannibalistic murderer. Some investigators believe he killed many more people, with estimates reaching as high as 600 people in one year alone.

5. Albert Fish

Albert Fish was a pedophile who described the flesh of children as the “sweetest.” He claimed the idea came from a deck hand who described a trip to Hong Kong during a famine when children were being sold as meat. Fish was caught when he sent a letter to the mother of his final victim, a 10-year-old girl, six years after she vanished. In the letter he gave graphic details about using her body to make a stew, complete with bacon strips, carrots and onions. Fish spent the next nine days locked in his room, eating his stew and compulsively masturbating. Fish was a religious maniac who punished himself by inserting needles into his groin. These needles caused Sing Sing’s electric chair to short circuit during the first attempt to execute him.

6. The Siege of Suiyang

Fish wasn’t entirely off the mark when he claimed that the Chinese had resorted to cannibalism during a famine. He was, however, wrong about the time and place. In 757 AD, the Tang army was fending off a siege by the Yan army in the city of Suiyang. The Tang were vastly outnumbered and placed their hopes on outlasting the Yan. A local governor forced Suiyang to share supplies with surrounding fortresses, causing supplies to run out after a few months. Unwilling to give themselves up to the Yan, the people of Suiyang eventually resorted to cannibalism. A total of 20,000-30,000 people were eaten. In reference to this, The Old Book of Tang eerily states: “People always remained loyal.”

7. The Siege of Ma’arrat al-Numan

In 1098, the city of Ma’arrat al-Numan, in what is modern-day Syria, was besieged by a group of defeated crusaders who had run out of supplies. They massacred a large portion of the Muslim population after they surrendered, but quickly discovered that the city was not as rich as they had hoped. By winter, supplies were dwindling again and the crusaders resorted to cannibalizing the remaining Muslim population. One of the crusader commanders wrote to Pope Urban II: “A terrible famine racked the army in Ma’arra, and placed it in the cruel necessity of feeding itself upon the bodies of the Saracens.”

8. Richard I of England

The Siege of Ma’arrat al-Numan was not the last time crusaders resorted to cannibalization. Richard I of England, better known as Richard the Lionheart, was one of the main architects behind the Third Crusade, a move to reclaim the Holy Lands. But Saladin, the Sultan of Egypt and Syria, earned the crusaders’ respect by being too shrewd, organized, and powerful to defeat. The best Richard could do was to negotiate a peace treaty that gave Christians the right to visit Jerusalem’s holy places, and he remained very bitter about the defeat. In spite, he invited some of Saladin’s ambassadors to attend a banquet and reputedly dined on the curried head of a Muslim warrior in their presence.

9. Idi Amin

Idi Amin was Uganda’s military dictator from 1971 to 1979. (He is also a frequent subject on this site.) Over those eight years he managed to wipe out a fairly large portion of Uganda’s population for fairly tenuous reasons. Basically, if he hated you, you died. When he first rose to power he had the military leadership rounded up and decapitated. He then sat on a pile of their heads and chastised them while taking bites from their flesh. Amin was a member of the Kakwa tribe. They believed that if you ate a section of a man you killed then his spirit could not return to haunt you. Amin ate a lot of his enemies before switching to oranges.

10. Joshua Blahyi

In the ’90s, Joshua Blahyi was one of many Liberian warlords who killed thousands of people. What separated Blahyi from the rest was that went by the nickname “General Buck Naked” and believed his nakedness protected him from bullets. His group routinely performed human sacrifices that involved cannibalism before battle. A quote from Blahyi said:

So, before leading my troops into battle, we would get drunk and drugged up, sacrifice a local teenager, drink their blood, then strip down to our shoes and go into battle wearing colourful wigs and carrying dainty purses we’d looted from civilians. We’d slaughter anyone we saw, chop their heads off and use them as soccer balls. We were nude, fearless, drunk and homicidal. We killed hundreds of people – so many I lost count.

Blahyi now works as a minister, talk about an amazing career transition. There is a documentary about him in the works.

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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.

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