And on May 4, 2015, the remaining residents of New South Wales woke up to find millions of crab spiders paratrooping into their village. Before long, entire villages were covered in spider webs so massive that they looked like they were designed to catch dinosaurs. But if spiders can mummify entire villages, how come we're not all speaking arachnid?

Luckily, these crab spiders are one of few Australian arachnids that can't kill someone just by looking at them. The younglings can't even break the skin with their bites. Like any adolescents, their nuisance was mainly TPing a bunch of houses and loitering around outside in large groups. Still, we have to salute Australians for their casual reaction of slight annoyance to this phenomenon. Most other people who see a cloud of spiders rain down on them would probably burn the country to the ground and try again elsewhere.

Daniel Munoz/Reuters

Speaking of ...

Right after 8 p.m. on June 18, 1875, people noticed flames in one area of town. The cause was quickly ascertained, as 1,800 barrels' worth of flaming whiskey came pouring through the city. Onlookers compared it to a stream of lava -- if, instead of killing you, drinking lava would make you sing sailor songs and cheat on your wife. The single-malt stream set fire to everything it touched and left people fleeing for their lives. Kind of. A healthy amount of Dubliners didn't want to waste the free booze, so even while fleeing, some people couldn't help trying to "capture the precious liquid before it went to waste" in anything they could, including hats and boots.

via Come Here To Me

At first, firefighters tried to put it out with water, but mixing whiskey and water only made it worse (looking at you, lightweights), and the fire spread even faster. Fortunately, like every other city in the 1800s, Dublin had literal shitloads of manure lying around, which they used to build dams to stop the fire from moving through the streets, halting the streams enough for the fire brigade to douse them. It wasn't until the day after that things had calmed enough for people to return to their homes and assess the damage. The "Great Whiskey Fire" was one of Dublin's most destructive blazes ever. Still, the police and fire departments were praised for their amazing response time -- it was almost as if they had arrived at the river of booze before anyone had reported that it was on fire. Amazingly, not a single Dubliner died from the fire or smoke. Thirteen of them did die from chugging burning gutter whiskey, though, which remained poisonous even in the hardened stomachs of 19th-Century Irish alcoholics.

Oh, look at that. Australia again. What a surprise. In the Darwinian nightmare that is Down Under, even the weeds can challenge us for dominance. The evocatively-named "hairy panic" (panicum effusum) is not what happens when someone finds out that their Brazilian waxer is going out of business. It's the mass buildup of dried brush, like giant fuzzy tumbleweeds. Which sounds all quaint and rustic, but looks like the first act in every movie set 200 years after the apocalypse.

Channel 7/AFP/Getty News

Because of increasingly dry weather, this dead grass spreads like (though it fortunately doesn't cause) wildfire. It only took a single farmer forgetting to secure his derelict paddock for waves of hairy panic to fuzz over the Australian city of Wangaratta. The plant which makes the tumbleweed is so fast-growing that the tumbleweeds can easily stack up to roof height, with some residents having to remove them multiple times a day.

After numerous complaints, the local council had to admit that they couldn't do anything to stop the invasion, other than hope for a strong wind to carry the tumbleweed over to the next town. A spokesperson told a newspaper that there wasn't much that could be done "from an enforcement side of things," that the council had a "very limited capacity to intervene," and that it was not something they "can stop from happening." We like to think he made this speech with increasing panic in his voice as the brush slowly built up around him.

Rick Wilking / Reuters

But while the weeds are relatively harmless to people and pets, they are very poisonous to sheep, causing swelling of the head, jaundice, and liver damage. Or as the Australians call it, "yellow big-head." Because you need to create as much whimsy as possible when living in a place where Mother Nature tries to bounce you on a daily basis.

The worrying part is that this negligence was by no means an isolated incident. As far back as the Civil War, Pittsburgh looked like God had trapped it under a shot glass and was blowing cigarette smoke in. Author Anthony Trollope described it as being "the blackest place which I ever saw" -- and not in the cool "great jazz city" kind of way. The reason people simply accepted living in a cloud of lung cancer was the progress it signified. Since people considered lots of smoke to mean lots of lucrative industry was happening, no one really worried about it until after World War II was over, when new environmental laws finally turned Pittsburgh into that garden paradise it is famous as today.

But the living horses were not the biggest waste management problem the city faced; that would be the dead ones. It was commonplace for horses to get sick or collapse from overwork. In 1880 alone, New York City had to deal with 15,000 horse corpses littering its streets. And if a particularly heavy specimen keeled over on Broadway? Then it was easier to let it stay there until it had rotted enough that it could be taken away piece by piece. The smell of the decay wasn't just unbearable; it was also lethal. About 20,000 people a year died from livestock-related illnesses -- which, if you're keeping score, means that more people than horses died from horse sickness.

via Collectors Weekly

Eventually, the city decided that something had to be done. They came up with an ingenious plan, which was to clean up the mountains of crap from time to time. It's amazing how it only took them about a century to figure out that gem. The city created a new, curious governmental branch called the Department of Sanitation, and sent men completely dressed in white (at least for the first two minutes of their shifts) to sweep the streets. Shockingly, these "White Wings" really helped turn around the city's health problem. Here's a comparison of two streets before and after people decided to start picking up their shit:

via Collectors Weekly

So if 1800s New York was the goddamn River Styx, then 1950s New York was, well ....