Books |
Ripley’s Believe It or Not! Seeing Is Believing!
By
Published: Jan 13, 2010
Category:
Art and Photography
“We own weird. Accept no substitutes.”
And so it is proved anew in Ripley’s Believe It or Not! Seeing Is Believing — a volume that, in the spirit of Robert Ripley, is bedazzlement for your already over-stimulated eyeballs (and marketing for the 35 Ripley museums).
The eyeball on the cover is like a flare of trumpets — this is not your grandfather’s coffee table book. Or even what previous generations remember about Ripley’s comparatively tame newspaper cartoon, radio show and television series.
This is flat-out weirdness.
A portrait of Barack Obama, made of 12,784 gumballs.
Skydivers playing Scrabble at 13,000 feet.
Dentists with stumps for hands.
A huge ball of rubber bands — over 700,000 in all, weighing nearly 5 tons — made by a boy in Florida.
A model of the space shuttle — made of 500,000 matchsticks.
A New Zealand man winning a contest by carrying bull’s testicles 165 feet — in his mouth.
The obligatory kitten with two faces.
A rat on a custom surfboard.
1,360 people simultaneous exploding cans of diet cola in Belgium.
An animal sculpture made of 3,000 crayons.
A man pulling a 3,748-pound bus — with hooks in his eyelids.
A magician levitating.
Just to make it up-to-date, there are pictures of more general weirdness.
But “Extreme Earth” — about climate change — somehow doesn’t seem very threatening.
By the time you close these pages, you’ll be much more haunted by the tattooed eyeball.
It’s a gesture of admirable restraint they didn’t put it on the cover.
Even the hippest coffee tables, after all, have their limits.
