Maddeningly bizarre, "cast in stone" - so people will have to live with it!

We have to say right away: we love these wicked additions to urban landscape - the weirder the better, less boring gray expanses and zombie-spawning parking lots! But we have to ask ourselves, what sort of oxygen these artists were inhaling, and what sort of psychedelic lunch they were eating before going on with something like this (see more than 85 examples below, some maybe slightly nsfw!).

As in some other DRB posts, we number each sculpture, and let you vote in the comments which one is the most unforgettable, disturbing and bizarre! As for me, I am going to erect a metal scarecrow on the roof of my building to scare off police helicopters, or build a nutty shrine for squirrels in my backyard, all the while fighting off local zombing...er, "zoning" by-law enforcers.

Should we start with the SuperLambBanana? Sure! -


1. Liverpool, England - via
2. People, shot full of holes, appropriately across L.A. Police Department, other one - via



3. A little overweight, Erevan, Armenia
4. San Jose, Costa Rica - via



5. "Unfinished City of Pittsburgh Water and Sewer Project # 8" - via Erik
6. The Lady Fish, San Francisco - via Kurt Rogers / The Chronicle


7 and 8. More wonderful urban sharks in San Jose, California - via


9. Disabled statue on Trafalgar Square in London, more info - via
10. Finger sculpture, similar to "Le Pouce" one, in France - via



11. City of Wilmington's tribute to the 1898 Wilmington Race Riot - via Erik
12. "The Angel of the North" in Gateshead, England - via



13. Happy in Chattanooga, Tennessee - via Sean Phipps
14. Skull involved in non-traditional activity, Prague - via Patton



15. Nameless example somewhere in Russia
16. Don't come close - via



17. Armenia, Erevan - via
18. Nazgul is spotted in Prague, the same one sits in Salzburg, Austria - via



19. Instead of surveillance camera...
20. David Cerny's classic "Pissing Men", Prague - via



21. Monument to Franz Kafka, Prague - via
22. Heavenly angel, resting... Prague again - via



23. Marionette Theater in Prague - via
24. Potsdam, Germany - via



25. Chattanooga, Tennessey - via Sean Phipps
26. Petrozavodsk, Republic of Karelia, Russia - via



27. A guy and a horse melting into a blob - but rather, this is Baron Münchhausen, pulling himself up;
28. Watering problem solved, Wateringen, Holland - via



29. Beheaded "things", and pots... in Moscow - via



30. Resting from trouble, in Moscow - via



31. More Russian characters
32. A Street Sweeper, by Tzereteli - via



33. Hungry customers share a biscuit, via



34. Try to sit on this bench (street art by Brad Downey)
35. ...in the meantime something big and round is getting ready to fall; Barcelona, Spain



36. Turin, Italy
37. Illustration to the "Fox and Crow" fable by Krylov - via



38. A kiss in Kharkov, Ukraine
39. A fat, fat pigeon, Raffle Place, Singapore - via



40. Ear creature in Cologne, Germany
41. Buddies, in Cheltenham, England - via



42. Hidden in the trees, Amsterdam - via
43. "A Running Knot", frolicking in grass, - via



44. More plumbing atrocities, in Mytyschi, Moscow
45. Crying Skull Monument, in Malmö, Sweden at the Triangeln Square - via



46. Some parenting angst, in Vigelands Park, Oslo - Norway, more info - via


47. Holey umbrella in Minsk, Belarus
48. Bathers in Singapore


49. Is this troll (Seattle, Washington) -
50. - is reaching for this purse?



51. Flying families, Moscow...
52. and overturned horses



53. Urban guys resting
54. and working... in Stockholm, Sweden, right outside Berzelii Park



55, 56. Weird faces in Moscow, via Tatiana Ionova



57. Statue in Hungary, definitely having issues...
58. Steampunk character, "Birth Machine Baby" by H. R. Giger, more - via



59. Spectacular urban "fountain" in Karlsruhe, Germany



60. A miserable student in one of Russian universities
61. And another miserable guy, Nuremberg, Germany



62. Bicycle in concrete, in Sarajevo.
63. FDR Memorial in Washington, DC



64. Downtown Salt Lake City, showing "Survival of the Fattest", info
65. Anatomy lesson in Manhattan - via


66. These ones are classics... Melbourne, Australia
67. Los Angeles, California



68. These are probably less known: "Cry in the Wilderness" in Minsk
69. and playful sculptures, unknown location


70. Some metamorphosis, unknown
71. Square head in meditation, in Nice, France



72. Strong!
73. and weak... Melbourne, Australia



74. Lenin having a break from politics


75. Russian chair stands firm on ice
76. Our melting economy, installation in Manhattan, more info


77. The Bear is doing great (Berlin)
78. ... and the Bull is dead (Manhattan), Photoshop?



79. While humans worship MacDonalds (with Photoshop help) ...
80. Apes are studying classics!


81. Mermaid milking herself, Bologna, Italy
82. and a guy, not really having a brain, looks like...



83. More milking, Treviso, Italy
84. and robot sculpture from "Laputa", Ghibli Museum in Mitaka, Japan


Now, for the unnumbered stuff, which is simply too interesting to be put into one voting pool:

Communist monuments in Yugoslavia (built in memory of various WWII battles) remind me of Flying Spaghetti Monsters... or "Neon Genesis Evangelion":








This is an entirely different kind of street art (Germany), simply brilliant:




Speaking about monuments simply crying for context... Look at the founding fathers of Communism, looking down on Nazi soldier entering a building... Anyone has details? -



This is only a first part of projected (truly monumental) series, so send us tips and images of whatever sculptural weirdness you spotted in public places!

Flying cars and jetpacks. Weren’t we all supposed to have those by now?

You know, along with the silver jump suits... that’s what they always told us in those science fiction movies and stories all those years ago. The world of tomorrow always looked so exciting. And yet, here we are in 2010 and no one seems to be flying to work in hover-cars or have a personal jetpack, although I think everyone was a little relieved that those expected silver jumpsuits didn’t become standard issue.




The jetpack, the rocket belt or rocket pack are names given to a number of different devices worn on the back that use jets of escaping gas to allow a single person to fly. Such technology has been featured in movies, TV, novels, short stories and comic books for a very long time....





However, despite advances in technology, jetpacks have not turned out, so far at least, to be very practical as a mode of personal transportation. Different types of jetpacks have been used on space missions, but the earth’s atmosphere and gravity, as well as limitations of the human body, have thus far hindered the use of jetpacks by the military or by the general public.

Nazi's Himmelsturmer / Skystormer

After conducting extensive research for an article about German Wonder Weapons earlier in 2009, I shouldn’t have been surprised to discover that jetpacks were yet another one of the technologies explored by the Germans during World War Two.

The Himmelsturmer, which translates as Skystormer, was the result of experiments in the latter days of the war. The device employed two low-power rockets, which were strapped to the chest and back of the pilot, enabling him, in theory at least, to fly 180 feet in the air. It was hoped it would allow engineering units to leap across rivers or minefields and was not designed for regular troops.

No images of the Himmelsturmer appear to have survived, but here are a couple of images of what it might have looked like:




Flights, or rather jumps, were measured in seconds, so there was no real descent time. The device shut down once the throttle was disengaged, so it was very simple to operate and there don’t appear to have been any injuries during tests. Like a lot of other German technology, the Himmelsturmer ended up in the hands of the US military after 1945. Bell Aerosystems did a few tests using a secure tether, since nobody wanted to take a risk with such an unknown and potentially unpredictable contraption. The Himmelsturmer disappeared into history, but jetpack research took off, so to speak, soon afterwards.


A dizzying height of eighteen inches... it's a start

The U.S. Army began researching rocket pack technology in 1949 and by 1952 successfully tested a rocket pack, which for a few seconds lifted a man into the air. In 1953, Wendell F. Moore began working for Bell on a jetpack using hydrogen peroxide powered rockets. A device called the Jumpbelt was demonstrated in 1958, but only had a marginally longer flight time than the early tests. The first real rocket belt flight took place in April 1961, when Harold Graham reached a dizzying height of eighteen inches, but flew for 133 feet in just 13 seconds. Later that year, Graham demonstrated the belt at the Pentagon and then for President Kennedy at Fort Bragg, North Carolina.







Longer, faster flights... but still too loud to be practical

In the early sixties, the US army contracted Bell Aerosystems to build a rocket pack. Powered by hydrogen peroxide, it was commonly known as the Bell Rocket Belt or man-rocket. Over the following years, Bell improved the duration of flights, reaching speeds up to ten mph, but a jet powered model, which had been tested with longer flight times, was scrapped because the army considered it too big and heavy. Mostly though the fact that someone couldn’t stay aloft for very long stopped the rocket belt from ever being put into production. Bell’s more substantial jet belt device developed in the later sixties had a flight time of around twenty minutes, but the military had been considering it for surveillance work and it was simply too loud to be practical.





"The Bell gang liked to attach rockets to almost anything — even this everyday office chair" (source):




To read about the first rocket belt pilots, visit this website.

After that, there was no further serious work done on jet pack technology and the devices have been used mostly for short demonstrations at entertainment venues, sports stadiums, monster truck shows and so on, as well as for scenes using stuntmen in movies and TV shows. At the opening of the summer Olympics in Los Angeles in 1984, 100,000 spectators in the stadium and around 2.5 billion television viewers around the world witnessed a rocket pack flight. Michael Jackson also used a stunt double to zoom off in a jetpack at the end of his concerts during the nineties. The Rocketman franchise currently uses a rocket belt based on the Bell Aerosystems model, giving demonstrations around the world.




Nasa’s Manned Maneuvering Unit isn’t strictly a jetpack, but deserves a mention here. The MMU is a propulsion backpack, utilizing gaseous nitrogen as a propellant, which was operated by US astronauts on three shuttle missions in 1984. The unit allowed the crew to take part in spacewalks without a tether away from the shuttle and was used at the time to retrieve two communications satellites, which were malfunctioning. The satellites were captured, put in the payload bay for stowage and returned to Earth. The MMU wasn’t used after the third mission but has been succeeded by a smaller device known as the Simplified Aid for EVA Rescue or SAFER, first flown in 1994. Also using gaseous nitrogen, it is a simplified version of the MMU and intended for emergency use only:




The Soviet space program had a similar device known as the SPK, occasionally used by cosmonauts on flights to the Mir space station. It was bigger than the American model, used oxygen instead of nitrogen and was attached to a tether for safety. The SPK was still attached to the exterior of the space station when Mir was destroyed on reentry after it was decommissioned in 2001.




Jet packs have been featured in books, magazines, movies, TV, comics and other areas of popular culture for decades. Buck Rogers, Rocketman, Adam Strange, Boba Fett... In the movie Thunderball in 1965, James Bond flew a jetpack, which was based on the Bell Aerospace Rocket Belt. This type of jetpack also featured in the TV series Lost in Space:




Flight time: 9 minutes. Cost: $200,000

Jet Pack International of California has updated some of the early rocket belt designs with modern materials and fuels, increasing flight times to over thirty seconds. The company offers regular public demonstrations, but also sells some jetpacks and rocket belts. The T-73 model runs on regular jet fuel and is a true jet pack. The flight time is nine minutes and the device sells for $200,000. Thunderbolt Aerosystems also from California has plans to develop a jet pack with a flight time in excess of thirty minutes. Currently, their hydrogen-peroxide/kerosene blend rocket pack flies for around seventy five seconds and costs over $90,000.






Not really a jet pack, but probably the most promising of new developments - and the one that is already produced commercially: New Zealand's Martin Jetpack is big, bold, and pretty efficient - read more info



While the vast majority of us may never have the financial resources to own one of these, it’s incredible to think that such devices are being seriously developed and flight times are definitely increasing. Maybe one day we’ll all have a personal jetpack after all?

The Backyard Rocketeer

From his backyard in Morelos, Mexico, Juan Manuel Lozano has engineered and test-flown a staple of rocket-powered conveyances, from rocket belts to bikes to carts to the most ludicrous personal helicopter we've seen this side of Inspector Gadget - each of them powered by his home-brewed ultra-pure hydrogen peroxide jet fuel. He's like a one-man turn-of-the-century flying machine montage. Watch a very entertaining and informative interview with this man here.