Roadside Geology series

Morris Engel was an influential American photographer, cinematographer and filmmaker best known for directing the 1953 film The Little Fugitive in collaboration with his wife, photographer Ruth Orkin.

Modern ghost city in China.

Dictionary of the Khazars: A Lexicon Novel is the first novel by Serbian writer Milorad Pavić, published in 1984. There is no easily discerned plot in the conventional sense, but the central question of the book (the mass religious conversion of the Khazar people) is based on an historical event generally dated to the last decades of the 8th century or the early 9th century when the Khazar royalty and nobility converted to Judaism, and part of the general population followed. However, most of the characters and events described in the novel are entirely fictional, as is the culture ascribed to the Khazars in the book, which bears little resemblance to any literary or archeological evidence. The novel takes the form of three cross-referenced mini-encyclopedias, each compiled from the sources of one of the Abrahamic religions (Christianity, Islam, and Judaism).

Gary Gilmore was an American criminal, and murderer, who gained international notoriety for demanding that his own death sentence be fulfilled following two murders he committed in Utah.

Mystery clocks.

The most interesting man in the world.

Ron Galella is an American photographer, known as a pioneer paparazzo. Dubbed “Paparazzo Extraordinaire” by Newsweek and “the Godfather of the U.S. paparazzi culture” by Time Magazine and Vanity Fair. On June 12, 1973, notoriously-reclusive actor Marlon Brando punched Galella without warning outside a restaurant in Chinatown in New York City, breaking the photographer’s jaw and knocking out five of his teeth on the left-side of his mouth.

The red-shanked douc is a species of Old World monkey, among the most colourful of all primates. This attractive monkey is sometimes called the “costumed ape” for its extravagant appearance.

REST IN PEACE HOMIE

A wildfire is any uncontrolled fire in combustible vegetation that occurs in the countryside or a wilderness area.

Hubert Burda is a German art historian and publisher. A kind of German Franco Maria Ricci, although not as cool.

More images

The Grünes Gewölbe (Green Vault) in Dresden, Germany is a museum that contains the largest collection of treasures in Europe.

Lithops is a genus of succulent plants in the ice plant family, Aizoaceae.

Aquascaping is the craft of arranging aquatic plants, as well as rocks, stones, cavework, or driftwood, in an aesthetically pleasing manner within an aquarium.

Xanthorrhoea

The worsleya grows in very extreme and moist environments, and is commonly found near waterfalls in rich soil situated on granite rocks.

Ray that looks like leopard!

Albert Eistein

Emperor tamarin

The bat-eared fox is a canid of the African savanna, named for its large ears. Fossil records show this canid to first appear during the middle Pleistocene, about 800,000 years ago.

Golden snub-nosed monkey is an Old World monkey in the Colobinae subfamily. Population estimates range from 8,000 to 15,000. It is endemic to a small area in temperate, mountainous forests of central and Southwest China.

Mandrill

Silvery-cheeked Hornbill is a large bird at 75 to 80 centimetres (30 to 31 in) in length with a very large creamy casque on the beak.

Patrick Leigh Fermor was a British author, scholar and soldier, who played a prominent role behind the lines in the Cretan resistance during World War II. He was widely regarded as “Britain’s greatest living travel writer”, with books including his classic A Time of Gifts (1977). A BBC journalist once described him as “a cross between Indiana Jones, James Bond and Graham Greene.”

Karl Hess left school at fifteen to work as a reporter and wound up, just a few years later, as associate editor at Newsweek. He helped William F Buckley Jr found the National Review, worked closely with Joseph McCarthy, and became chief speechwriter for Barry Goldwater. But true to a conscience that caused him to question the claims and authority of others, Hess eventually rejected conservatism and embraced the libertarian politics of the New Left. He dabbled with drugs, rode motorcycles, worked with the Black Panthers, got arrested while protesting the war in Vietnam, and published an article in Playboy that defined libertarianism and ignited a national debate. As an anti-Communist he co-operated with the FBI, but as a libertarian he fought the IRS until he was nearly destitute. Whatever his political leanings, he always despised conceit, exploded intolerance, and embraced life to the fullest. He was a man who travelled in influential circles, often close to power, but, in his own words, ‘mostly on the edge’. Karl Hess participated in many of the defining events of 20th-century America, a self-taught boy who became a self-made journalist. “Mostly on the Edge” chronicles the life education of Hess, who became a defiant tester of the prevailing ideas of each decade. He lived by trial and error, and was always willing to acknowledge his mistakes. Like Franklin and Thoreau, Hess hoped to wake up America by questioning the moral majority, fighting the Kafkaesque intrusions of government, and encouraging his family, friends, and highly influential colleagues to think for themselves. Hess provides eyewitness accounts, unique personal observations, startling and valuable insights on leadership and dissent, and, in the end, leaves behind a clear path to realising the dream of freedom.

Northrop Grumman B-2 Spirit is an American heavy bomber. The cost of each aircraft averaged US$737 million in 1997 dollars ($1.01 billion today).

The Lockheed F-117 Nighthawk is a single-seat, twin-engine stealth ground-attack aircraft. The F-117 was born after combat experience in the Vietnam War when increasingly sophisticated Soviet surface-to-air missiles (SAMs) downed heavy bombers. It was a black project, an ultra-secret program for much of its life, until the late 1980s. The project began in 1975 with a model called the “Hopeless Diamond” (a wordplay on the Hope Diamond due to its appearance).

Diego Garcia is a tropical, footprint-shaped coral atoll located south of the equator in the central Indian Ocean. Several groups claim that the military base on Diego Garcia has been used by the U.S. government for transport of prisoners involved in the controversial extraordinary rendition program.

Dominion of Melchizedek is a micronation known for facilitating large scale banking fraud in many parts of the world.

That’s 3 different women, y’all. The only look that can love a con man.

Matsuda 2809, the glasses Linda Hamilton wore in Terminator.

Metaphysics of Youth is maybe the best written essay of all time.

Villa Torlonia is a villa and surrounding gardens in Rome, Italy, formerly belonging to the Torlonia family. Disused for a time, Mussolini rented it from the Torlonia for one lira a year to use as his state residence from the 1920s onwards. It was abandoned after 1945, and allowed to decay in the following decades, but recent restoration work has allowed it to be opened to the public as a museum owned and operated by Rome’s municipality.

Rita Levi Montalcini is an Italian neurologist who, together with colleague Stanley Cohen, received the 1986 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their discovery of Nerve growth factor (NGF). More importantly, she’s a fucking style icon.

Perspecta: The Yale Architectural Journal the oldest student-edited architectural journal in the United States, is internationally respected for its contributions to contemporary architectural discourse with original presentations of new projects as well as historical and theoretical essays.

I can’t believe I played with this as a kid.

Ammolite is a rare and valuable opal-like organic gemstone found primarily along the eastern slopes of the Rocky Mountains of North America. It is arguably the rarest gemstone on earth, rivaling the rarity of such gemstones as alexandrite and red diamonds. It is made of the fossilized shells of ammonites, which in turn are composed primarily of aragonite, the same mineral that makes up nacreous pearls.