When I was a kid, my favorite part of birthday parties was the goodie bag at the end, and I don’t think I’m alone in that. Sure, there was food and playing and cake and all that, but you got to go home with something! For free!
You can think of the extra info you get with these pics as the birthday party goodie bag — not what you came for, but something you get to take home anyway. What you do with it is up to you, but we want you to enjoy it all the same.
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1. You can buy and bite into apples that have red flesh rather than the more common white flesh.
Some varieties of apples with red flesh include the Pink Pearl and the Mountain Rose .
2. All the trees in the orchard below were planted in perfectly straight rows, although the rows are obviously not straight now.
An earthquake struck, shifting the position of the plants.
3. You know how sometimes a truck that’s too tall goes under a bridge that’s too low? Well, this is what happens when that truck is carrying luxury cars.
That is a bad day for that truck driver.
4. This is what the Southeastern U.S. looks like from 102,000 feet above sea level.
A group launched a weather balloon from Tennessee with a camera and some GPS equipment on board, and it was recovered in South Carolina.
5. It’s easy to see where you might think this is a scenic painting of a beach with a boat off in the distance, but it’s just the bottom of a door.
Which explains the edge of the doormat at the bottom of the pic.
6. This 16-story tower on the University of Cincinnati’s campus was created with a single pour of concrete.
While it’s an architectural curiosity, Crosley Tower was also named one of the ugliest university buildings in America by Architectural Digest.
7. As this checkerboard landscape shows, logging patterns can be extremely precise.
The idea behind the checkerboard pattern is to reduce the effect of logging on the ecosystem, and it’s been practiced since the 1860s.
8. When budgies and other colorful home birds escape, sometimes they take up with flocks of local birds.
The nice thing is that they stick out, so they’re easy to spot when they’re out in the wild, which is always the first step to getting them back home.
9. Guys, if your flashlight ever looks like this, it’s probably time for a new flashlight.
See, that’s what happens when the batteries inside get so corroded and swollen that the corrosion leaks through the side. Handle with care!
10. If you look at the workers around its feet, you get a real sense of the scale of the largest statue in the world in India.
The new Statue of Unity is a towering 182 meters (597 feet) tall, almost twice as high as the Statue of Liberty.
11. Around Halloween, it’s not uncommon — but definitely odd — to see people hollow out giant pumpkins and paddle them around in a “boat” race.
Actually, it looks pretty fun, but I wonder how bad you’d smell after the race.
12. Seen in Portland, a group of witches out for a morning paddle.
It’s part of an annual tradition around Halloween and it draws hundreds of participants to the Willamette River, all while gathering donations for local charities.
13. You see plenty of odd and heavily planned costumes at Halloween, often well executed as well, but have you ever seen a horse in a Halloween costume?
I’m particularly impressed by how well the horse is taking the helmet portion of this AT-AT costume.
15. Many bird owners will recognize this as a naturally occurring cuttlebone, even though it looks machine-made.
Cuttlebones, taken from cuttlefish, are actually shells, and they’re often given to birds to peck away at as a source of calcium.
16. You’ve seen and maybe even tasted the oddly shaped but highly flavorful heirloom tomatoes, but have you ever seen an heirloom carrot?
Because you have now! Although they look quite different from the regular orange carrots, they don’t taste very different.
17. For this watusi, every day is Halloween. Its distinctive marking on its forehead has drawn comparisons to The Punisher’s symbol.
Apparently, this fellow is a gentle giant and quite popular at the safari park he calls home.
18. This almost looks like a modern art piece, but it’s tinted with tragedy because it’s the outline of all the things that were in a drawer during a fire.
Here’s hoping that cleaning up soot was the worst of this fire.
19. Some ambitious, patient person designed a map of the United States and built it into a home’s rock wall.
They might have had some difficulties on the East Coast, but by and large, it’s surprisingly faithful.
20. In Chile’s Atacama Desert, the world’s largest telescope is starting to take shape.
It will have a primary mirror 39 meters in diameter and gather more light than all of the existing 8-10 meter telescopes on earth combined.
21. For kids — both big and small, to be sure — who want to learn more about construction, this site has museum-style info panels about all the machinery.
Fittingly, this construction work is happening at a zoo. You have to love the Latinized names, like Shovelis maximus .
22. Why are multiple people crouching down on the ground on this street?
Because they’re in Dubai, and they’re trying to get the entire Burj Khalifa into their camera’s frame. That’s dedication!
23. If you can find the right stretch of highway in Oregon, you can see a smiley face in the forest.
Someone planted deciduous trees among the evergreens to make a smiley face in the fall when the colors change. Kind of a brilliant long-term plan, right?
24. If you look very closely at a British one pound coin, you see that “one pound” has been stamped into it in extremely small lettering.
Seems like a pretty effective anti-counterfeiting measure.
