POSTED BY MARTIN KICH

Here is a photo of city boys getting rooftop swimming instruction in the 1920s.

This is a more recent photo identified as showing a man swimming in a river near New Delhi in India. (I am not sure what the white stuff is, but I am fairly certain that it’s not good for the river or for the swimmer. Initially, I thought that it was a photo of a man who had buried himself in the snow—some sort of variation on the polar-bear swims.)

Reuters, Adnan Abidi

And this is a photo of beach erosion near Soulac, France. Every beach does not have to have perfect white, tan, or black sand to be enticing. But the marine blue and gray of this beach is almost as uninviting as the foam on the river in the previous photo.

Reuters–Regis Duvignau