Unrealistic beauty expectations are nothing new: Julia Pastrana was known in life as the "world's ugliest woman," and her husband made money from this by taking her around to circuses and theaters as a curiosity. He even bought advertising in the New York Times calling his spouse a "link between mankind and the ourang-outang." After Julia Pastrana's death in 1860, he carted her corpse around the world for years, so people could see why he called the "bear woman." Her remains were eventually abandoned in Norway.

The story of her sad life and strange appearance—she was apparently born with the condition called hypertrichosis—is making the news again because what's [...]

"A new year show put on by a touring circus in the Belarusian city of Vitebsk was so awful that police were called in, local media report. Spectators suspected the Russian performers of being drunk as artistes repeatedly fell off bicycles and jugglers dropped their props. Exotic beasts, including two species apparently plucked from the realms of fantasy, did not show up." One of those species, if you're scoring at home, was "orcs."

Photo by jblackburn, from Flickr.