Thursday 8 March 2012

Top 20 Real Pictures Made Famous by the Internet

With the current expansion of Photoshop, it can be difficult to determine if a picture posted online is real or fake. Every year hundreds of photographs become viral on the Internet, and in most cases we have an opinion over their authenticity. This article will examine 20 real pictures that were made famous by the Internet. In most cases, the photos have caused an Internet debate over their origin. All of the images depict real events, but some have false back-stories. I will attempt to clear up the facts surrounding some of our favorite viral photographs.




















   

The King of Pop in His Best Ages

The King of pop – Michael Jackson, it can’t be a person in this world who hasn’t heard about him, or one of his songs. There were lots of rumors about him, though he wasn’t a scandalous person, he was kind of eccentric. Since he was singing from his fifth year, these pictures were taken when he was at the peak of his career, the time when hits like Thriller, Bad, Beat it and many others were created.


















Top Ten Man’s Life Magazine Covers

I remember growing up as a kid in the 1960’s and 1970’s and seeing the many different “men’s adventure” magazines. These were usually called “pulp” magazines, and they always had covers depicting, as Jay leno once quipped: rag tag bunches of GI’s risking their lives to rescue their comrades from Hitler’s elite D-Cup Brigade. These magazines were also sometimes referred to as “sweat magazines” because the men depicted on the cover were usually covered in sweat from fighting off Hitler’s D-Cup girls or wild beasts. My grandfather had a subscription to one or more of these pulp magazines and I remember sneaking a look at them when we would go visit him and my grandmother. I also remember seeing these magazines along with the piles of hunting and fishing magazines at the barber shop.

These men’s adventure pulp magazines were very popular in the 1950’s-1960’s, before Playboy and Penthouse came along (and later, magazines like Maxim and Men’s Health). They were popular for several reasons. For one, they were cheap, usually costing only a quarter. For another, they were pretty much all that was out there for the “adventure seeking man” of the mid-20th Century. But mostly, these magazines were meant to appeal to a different generation of American male – one not concerned at all about physical fitness and how to achieve six-pack abs or the best way to remove their chest hair. These were men who (mostly) served in World War II and Korea and saw themselves as rugged individualists who knew danger, death, fear, and survival (or at least fantasized that they had experienced it ).

For each magazine, a brightly colored magazine cover was created by artists in such a way as to appeal to these male fantasies – rescuing scantily clad and always well-breasted women from savages or Nazis, surviving in the wilderness, going on African adventures, fighting Indians and cattle poachers in the old west, and my most favorite of all magazine cover topic – surviving attacks by vicious animals!

There were, at the peak of pulp magazine popularity, about fifty such magazines, but my favorite has to be “Man’s Life” mostly because it seemed to specialize in all manner of crazy animal attacks. The trick was always the same, get an artist to paint a compelling and evocative cover and then get a writer to create a “true life” story around it. And the artists seemed to get more and more creative in trying to top the previous month’s animal attack, year after year. But always, there were familiar themes in every cover involving attacks by animals. So here are ten of the very best “man versus animal” covers from the classic, Man’s Life magazine.











Giant Twin Towers Petronas

At the end of the twentieth century, race to build the tallest buildings in the world reached its peak. American buildings started to “give up“, and most world projects were planned in Europe and Asia. Petronas Towers or Malaysia’s Twin, as many call them, are still the highest commercial-residential buildings in the world. They are 452 meters high and their construction was completed in 1988. Both towers have 88 floors. They consist mainly of various metals and glass. At 41st and 42nd  floor these building are connected by “air floor”. Petronas towers are located in the capital of Malaysia, Kuala Lumpur. The center of the city is the so-called “golden triangle” dominated by tall buildings and among them, these two huge buildings attract the most attention. They are designed by the architect Cesar Peli, who designed several large constructions projects such as buildings, airport terminals and bridges. Towers project was based on traditional Malaysian-Islamic cultural elements.