The Top 25 Cracked.com Articles of 2009

The views have been tallied. The commenters have been ignored. Here are the most ape-shit bananas popular articles we put up this year.

In the olden days when shoes were a luxury and smallpox was a right of passage, men like William Randolph Hearst used their complete control over communication airwaves to tell the general populace whatever lie happened to be convenient (see marijuana is evil) or interesting (see below).

With the advent of the Internet, the situation has changed so that instead of powerful media moguls spreading bullshit, pretty much anybody can do it. After all, if the story is good enough, the mainstream media will report it, no matter how transparently retarded it is.

We are a pretty forgiving society when it's convenient. So what if Halle Berry has a habit of hit and run mayhem? She showed her rack in Swordfish. If we're fond enough of your music, movies or boobs, you can get busted committing what's known as an "atrocity" when done by someone who isn't cool. If we like you, all you have to do is sit back and wait for our short attention spans to take over, and the good will to return. For instance, you probably forgot about the time ...

We all understand that action movies are cheesy escapism. After all, could one commando really take out a whole compound full of bad guys?

Actually, yes. It turns out the history books are full of stories of soldiers doing things so badass they'd hesitate to put them into a film for fear of killing the realism. Like these five, for example.

Plastic surgery has blessed us with something our forefathers never had: huge boobs on skinny girls. But science--and shallow people with extra money to throw around--were not satisfied with that miracle.

No, they continued developing plastic surgery techniques that strayed out of the realm of the vain and image-obsessed and into the land of WTF.

The official release of Windows 7 is only a few weeks away, and if you're anything like me, you're probably asking yourself what effect this will have on your lives. Will the gates of Heaven open up and a consort of large breasted angels descend to guide you into computing heaven?

The thing about being super rich is that you eventually run out of things to buy. You can only live in so many houses, or drive so many cars, or pay to have so many enemies killed.

Fortunately, before you ever get so desperate as to, say, give money to the poor, there is a whole industry devoted to inventing ridiculous things to waste it on.

Anyone who's worked shoveling shit at a circus can tell you that making entertainment isn't as much fun as watching it.

The same goes for TV shows, and in some cases, it's even worse than the elephant shit thing. There are shows you loved and grew up with that, behind the scenes, were a constant, dark carnival of torment.

In the Golden Age of Advertising, producing commercials was easy. You could pretty much toss in any horrific stereotype you thought would help sell your product, and if any minorities complained, who cares? Minorities aren't the majority, duh.

Of course, in this era of political correctness, those clumsy, cringe-worthy stereotypes are a thing of the past.

Well, almost...

Throughout the course of an average day, you're probably faced with 10 to 20 different things that make you say, "Man, if I knew who came up with that idea, I'd punch them clean in the face." But where do you place that absolutely understandable rage? You place it on these people. With your fist, if possible.

This is the fourth installment of our series where we prove that sometimes, real life is stranger than Photoshop (see Part One, Part Two and Part Three).

So enjoy our continuing chronicle of jaw-dropping pics that make you shout "FAKE!" the moment you see them, but in fact are not. Even if, in some cases, we really wish they were ...

It's that time again.

It's becoming a reader favorite and Halloween tradition for us to count down those ridiculously over-the-top gruesome urban myths that, oh by the way, happen to be true. This is our third year (HERE is the first one, and HERE is the second) and once again these stories prove that truth is far more horrifying than fiction.

It seems like it's close to impossible to raise a normal child these days, what with the violent video games and the 4chan and the childhood obesity. But if the latest research is to be believed, even the good stuff we thought we were doing for our kids is ruining them.

Psychology is one of those subjects that everybody likes to think they know something about. We love to go around diagnosing our friends and co-workers, both to make sense of the world and to make ourselves feel like we're smarter than they are.

But like any science that makes its way into the pop culture, a lot of the "common sense" statements we hear every day are so wrong that they border on raving idiocy. Such as...