Forbidden Knowledge Part 2

_02:: The Illuminati Over the centuries, lots of groups have called themselves the Illuminati ("Enlightened Ones"), but the one we're talking about here began as the Bavarian Illuminati. A radical product of the Enlightenment and offshoot of the religion-based Freemasons, the Illuminati espoused secular freethinking and intellectualism and proved a threat to Europe's old order. Although they were officially banned by the Bavarian government in 1784, some claim that they live on to this day in other guises (see "The Trilateral Commission" on page 18). So, what's the Illuminati's goal? To establish a new world order of capitalism and authoritarianism, of course! They've been accused of manipulating currencies, world stock markets, elections, a.s.sa.s.sinations, and even of being aliens. One common myth is that the eye-and-pyramid image on the dollar bill is a symbol of the Illuminati watching over us. Nope. It's a symbol of strength and durability (though unfinished, symbolizing growth and change), and the all-seeing eye represents the divine guidance of the American cause. Or so the government says.

_03:: Opus Dei This organization has a $42 million, 17-story headquarters building on Lexington Avenue in New York City, claims 85,000 members in 60 countries, and was featured in Dan Brown's bestseller The Da Vinci Code. Now that its existence has been significantly unsecretized, this ultraorthodox Catholic sect has definitely raised its share of eyebrows. Founded in 1928 by Saint Josemaria Escriva (a Spanish priest who bore an uncanny resemblance to Karl Malden), Opus Dei is the short name for the Prelature for the Holy Cross and the Work of G.o.d. The sect (some would say cult) stresses a return to traditional Catholic orthodoxy and behavior, especially celibacy, with members falling into one of three levels. Numeraries live in Opus Dei facilities, devote their time and money to the prelature, attend ma.s.s daily, and engage in mortification of the flesh (wearing a spiked chain around the thigh called a cilice, taking cold showers, or flagellating themselves with a knotted rope called "the discipline"). Next come a.s.sociates (kind of like Numeraries, but living "off campus"), then Supernumeraries (the rank-and-file members). The group did gain the praise of Pope John Paul II, and has engaged in a lot of charity work. Yet, critics accuse the group of being linked to fascist organizations like Franco's government in Spain, and of anti-Semitism and intolerance, even of other Catholics.

_04:: Skull and Bones Top dog among all the collegiate secret societies, Yale's Skull and Bones dates to 1832 and goes by other spooky names like Chapter 322 and the Brotherhood of Death. With a large number of Bonesmen who have attained positions of power, including the president and the head of the CIA, it's no wonder that rumors abound that the society is h.e.l.l-bent on obtaining power and influencing U.S. foreign policy. The fact that they meet in an imposing templelike building on the Yale campus called (what else?) the Tomb doesn't really help. Bonesmen are selected, or "tapped," during their junior year and can reveal their members.h.i.+p only after they've graduated. But they can never talk about it. The Bones have been accused of all sorts of crazy rituals and conspiracies, including drug smuggling and the a.s.sa.s.sination of JFK (a hated Hahvahd man, after all). It's even rumored that the skull of Geronimo resides in the Tomb, stolen from its resting place by Prescott Bush, Dubya's granddad. In one of the more commonly known rituals, the initiate spends all night naked in an open coffin, confessing all his s.e.xual experiences to the group. So, who's lucky enough to have made such a confession? George H. W. Bush, George W. Bush, John Kerry, William Howard Taft, McGeorge Bundy, William F. Buckley, and Henry Luce are just a few.

_05:: The Bohemian Club This is a weird one. In the majestic forests of Sonoma County north of San Francisco lies the Bohemian Grove, the 2,700-acre wooded retreat of the Bohemian Club, the nation's most exclusive men's club. Every July since 1879, the "Bohos" have gathered at the Grove for a two-week encampment, where they're divided into more than 100 residential camps with names like Owl's Nest, Cave Man, and Lost Angels. Members.h.i.+p has included, well, just about everybody important: Ronald Reagan, Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon (who once called it "f.a.ggy"), Gerald Ford, Colin Powell, d.i.c.k Cheney, and many CEOs and wealthy business leaders like Malcolm Forbes. Each encampment opens with a robed-and-hooded ceremony called the Cremation of Care, in which an effigy called "Dull Care" (symbolizing worldly concerns) is burned before a 40-foot concrete statue of an owl, symbol of wisdom and the club's mascot. Throughout the week, plays are staged (called High Jinx and Low Jinx), there's lots of eating and drinking (and, reportedly, urinating on trees), and members are treated to speeches called Lakeside Talks. Some opponents go so far as to accuse the group of Satanism, witchcraft, h.o.m.os.e.xuality, and prost.i.tution, while more reasonable observers object to the Lakeside Talks as national policy discussions to which the public is not privy. But above all, it's seen as a way that some of the elite meet others of the elite, thereby ensuring that they'll all stay elite. All this makes the club's seemingly anticonspiratorial slogan"Weaving spiders, come not here"that much more ironic.

_06:: The Trilateral Commission While not, on its face, as juicily sinister as some of the other societies on this list, the Trilateral Commission has been accused of all sorts of underhanded shenanigans by its critics. Formed in 1973 by David Rockefeller, the Commission includes over 300 prominent citizens from Europe, Asia, and North America in a forum for discussing the regions' common interests. But conspiracy theorists hold that the Trilateral Commission, along with the Council on Foreign Relations and others, is really just a front for a larger, more sinister order called the Round Table Groups, founded in London over 100 years ago and bent on the creation of a new world order, a global capitalist police state. Yikes! (For the record, some say the Round Table Groups are themselves just fronts for another society, the Illuminati, so who knows?) American members of the Trilateral Commission have included Bill Clinton, Henry Kissinger, Jimmy Carter, d.i.c.k Cheney, and Dianne Feinstein.

6 Worst Miscalculations of All Time To err is human, but to really screw up you need to think you know exactly what you're doing first.

_01:: Columbus and the Indies Pepper used to be one of the most valuable substances in Europe, mainly because it was effective in masking the taste of spoiled foods. But since it came from the "East Indies," or the modern-day countries of Southeast Asia, it took forever to get there and back over land. Enter Christopher Columbus, who was sure that the earth was round and that he could therefore sail west across the Atlantic Ocean to the Indies. Only problem: he got the math very, very wrong. Aside from using the calculations of French cartographer Pierre d'Ailly, which vastly underestimated the distance around the globe from the European side to Asia, Columbus also misread maps, believing that "miles" referred to the 5,000-foot Roman mile rather than the 6,082-foot nautical mile. So Columbus believed the circ.u.mference of the planet at the equator was 19,000 miles rather than 24,600 miles. Hiding in the missing 5,600 miles, of course, were North and South America.

_02:: Chern.o.byl Ironically, the catastrophic 1986 explosion at the Chern.o.byl nuclear plant began with an experiment to increase reactor safety. As part of the experiment, engineers had to slowly power the reactor downkind of like "idling" a car engine. But they reduced energy production too quickly, and the reaction was "poisoned" by an increase in neutron absorption. Rather than wait 24 hours to restore energy production, as recommended, the head engineer decided to remove graphite control rods to get power back up because he was impatient, eventually leaving just six rather than the minimum of 30 decreed by operating manuals. Shortly after, when the engineers cut energy to the cooling system, coolant water heated up and quickly began to boil. The water had stabilized the reactor by absorbing neutrons, but when it turned to steam it was less effective. Further, because the rods had been withdrawn they no longer moderated the power production. When the production suddenly spiked, engineers started an emergency process to push all the graphite control rods back into the reactor core and stop the reaction, but because of a small design flaw with the graphite caps on the ends of the rods the exact opposite happened. The reactor overheated almost instantaneously and exploded, and approximately 50 tons of nuclear fuel vaporized into the atmosphere.

Touch of Evil In 1999, the $125 million Mars Climate Orbiter burned and disintegrated prior to landing. After NASA investigated, simple "bad data" was shown to have caused the mishap. The gaffe? Engineers accidentally mixed up metric units with English units in certain calculations.

_03:: Custer's Last Stand In 1876, to destroy the Sioux resistance and force them onto a reservation, the U.S. government sent three commandersGenerals Crooks, Terry, and Gibbonto converge on the Ogalala Sioux encampment at Little Big-horn in Montana. Lieutenant General George Armstrong Custer was serving under Terry's command, and unbeknownst to Custer, by the time he arrived, other Sioux tribes had more than doubled the size of the village, bringing it to 7,000 inhabitants. After an initial skirmish Custer was afraid that the Sioux would retreat before he could attack, so he split up his command of 657 men into three groupsa fatal mistakeand attempted to surround them. When he finally located the village, he led his troops in an all-out a.s.sault, saying "Don't worry, boysthere's enough of them for all of us!" Indeed there were. Things turned bad very quickly, as the Sioux spread the alarm. In the end, Custer made his famous "Last Stand" with about 100 men on a small hill near the village, facing 1,500 Sioux warriors. A total of 263 men died that day, the worst defeat ever inflicted by Native Americans on the U.S. military.

_04:: The Big Dig Boston's "Big Dig" is the most ambitious urban infrastructure project ever undertaken in the United Statesbut it's become infamous for cost overruns and schedule delays that can be measured in geologic time. Aiming to take Boston's highways and relocate them to tunnels, the Big Dig hoped to spur new development and revitalization. In fact, early on, plans were also added to build a new tunnel under Boston Harbor to Boston's international airport in the east. The price of the project? $2.6 billion, with a project completion date predicted for 1997 or 1998. Because of geologic conditions, design mistakes, shoddy construction work, and frequent public opposition, however, the Big Dig is still going on, with a price tag of over $14.6 billion. What's more, tunnels have sprung hundreds of mysterious leaks, cutting off traffic, and construction has lowered the water table, potentially damaging buildings as they settle. How Boston digs itself out of this one is yet to be seen.

_05:: Draining of the Aral Sea Shortly after the Russian Revolution in 1917, Soviet planners started diverting water from two large rivers in Central Asiathe Amu Darya and the Syr Daryato turn Central Asian deserts into fertile cotton plantations. And the project was successful! Except...the only problem was that the rivers were the sole source of water for the Aral Sea, the second-largest lake in the world. Other rivers were supposed to be diverted to compensate but as the Soviet economy declined, those projects never got under way. By 1960, between 20 and 50 cubic kilometers of water were being diverted from the sea every year; during the 1960s, the sea level dropped by an average of 20 centimeters a year, during the 1970s 5060 centimeters a year, and during the 1980s 8090 centimeters a year. Currently the sea has lost about 80% of its volume, and 60% of its surface area, and is expected to disappear entirely in the near future.

It's a Mad, Mad, Mad,

Mad Artist

TALENTS WHO WERE TOO HARD ON THEMSELVES.

It's hard to imagine a greater artistic success than Leonardo da Vinci, but the original Renaissance man was a notoriously harsh judge of himselfhis last words are reported to have been "I have offended G.o.d and mankind because my work didn't reach the quality it should have." The famously depressed Sylvia Plath's will to perfection led to a Leonardian sense of disappointment in her own work. She frequently felt like a failure, and one of her first suicide attempts (at which she also failed) occurred after she was rejected from a fiction-writing cla.s.s at Harvard. And John Kennedy Toole, author of the brilliant comic romp A Confederacy of Dunces, fared no better. Toole wasn't entirely humble (he felt that the book was a masterpiece), but after it was rejected by a publisher, Toole believed he would never be anything but a failed writer, so he committed suicide in 1969. After Toole's death, his mother took the book to the novelist Walker Percy, who reluctantly read it and was surprised to enjoy it. Dunces was finally published in 1980 and went on to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

_06:: Vietnam and Casualty Burdens One persistent question remains about Vietnam: How could the U.S. government and military make such a bad blunder? Much of the responsibility lies with the top bra.s.s at the Pentagon, including Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, appointed by President John F. Kennedy in 1960, who believed that if American forces killed a certain number of the enemy, their economy would break down and resistance would collapse. However, these calculations proved disastrously wrong. Because they believed they were fighting for their independence, the North Vietnamese absorbed at least one million casualties. After the war, American officials still didn't get it. General William Westmoreland, the highest-ranking American commander during the war, said, "An American commander who took the same losses...would have been sacked overnight." Later McNamara himself said, "What I thought was that a very high rate of casualties would soften them up for negotiations. They paid no attention whatsoever to casualties. It had no impact at all militarily, and it had no impact on negotiations."

Bigger Is Better:

7 Insane Soviet Projects

The Soviet Union decided the best way to show up the West was through building the biggest version of any given object. The following are just seven of the largest examples.

_01:: Magnitogorsk Whether it was for guns, tanks, s.h.i.+ps, railroads, or bridges, Stalin, whose name means "Man of Steel," knew he needed one thing above all else for his 1920s Soviet Union: steel. He also knew that to the east, in the southern Ural Mountains, there was a unique geologic oddity named Magnitkaan entire mountain of pure iron ore, the key ingredient for steel. In 1929, Stalin decreed that a city, "Magnitogorsk" (see what he did there?), be built from scratch around said mountain to mine the ore and turn it into steel. So began one of the largest construction projects ever undertaken. With expertise provided by Communist sympathizers from the West, a ready-made city for 450,000 inhabitants was constructed in about five years. Of course, Stalin saved on labor costs by having the heavy lifting done by political prisoners. In fact, 30,000 people died in the effort. Steel production began in 1934, but shortly after World War II the iron ore ran out and the city's economy collapsed.

_02:: The BalticWhite Sea Ca.n.a.l Ever the optimist, this time Stalin wanted to connect the Baltic Sea, with its key port of Leningrad, to the White Sea's port of Archangelsk. The idea was that he could move the Soviet navy fleets back and forth. So Stalin had more political prisoners sent to work on the ca.n.a.lthere was a seemingly endless supply from the gulagsand after a few brutal years it was completed in 1933. Disease, poor nutrition, and brutal conditions took a huge toll, though, with as many as 250,000 of the slave laborers dead by the end of it. The icing on the cake? The ca.n.a.l was completely useless when finished. For most of its length it was too shallow to admit anything larger than a small barge. Later a book of propaganda detailing the biographies of "heroic" workers and engineers, intended for distribution in capitalist countries, had to be recalled because in the downtime Stalin had ordered all the main characters shot.

_03:: The World's Largest Hydrofoil The world's largest hydrofoil wasn't really a hydrofoil at all. In fact, it was one of a series of unique machines called "ground effect" vehicles built by the Soviet Union beginning in the 1960s. The Soviets had a monopoly on this fascinating technology, relying on a little-known principle of physicsthe "ground effect"in which a dense cus.h.i.+on of air hugging the ground can provide more lift to a vehicle than air at higher alt.i.tudes. Hovering about 312 feet above the ground, these vehicles resemble Luke Skywalker's levitating craft from Star Wars, and are far more fuel-efficient than airplanes, helicopters, hydrofoils, or cars. And at 58 feet, the largest of these, the "Caspian Sea Monster" was given its distinctive name after CIA a.n.a.lysts saw it at the Caspian port of Baku in photos taken by spy satellites. The craft traveled at speeds of up to 240 mph, had a swiveling nose cone for cargo loading, and could carry up to as many as 150 pa.s.sengers.

_04:: Avant-garde Design for a

Funkier Parliament

Designed by Vladimir Tatlin (18851953) in 1920, the Monument to the Third International was a gigantic spiraling iron structure intended to house the new Soviet government. Taller than the Eiffel Tower (and the yet-to-be constructed Empire State Building) at more than 1,300 feet, this curving, funnel-shaped structure was meant to encase three successively smaller a.s.sembly areas rotating on industrial bearings at different speeds, faster or slower according to their importance. Rotating once a year in the lowest level was a giant cube for delegates attending the Communist International from all over the world. A smaller pyramid, rotating once a month above it, would house the Communist Party's executives. The third levela sphere rotating once dailywould house communications technology to spread propaganda, including a telegraph office, radio station, and movie screen. Unfortunately the giant structure would have required more iron than the entire Soviet Union produced in a year, and was never built.

_05:: A Palace for the People In 1931, Joseph Stalin ordered that the largest Orthodox Christian cathedral in the world335 feet high, the product of 44 years of back-breaking labor by Russian peasantsbe dynamited so he could build an enormous "Palace of the People," to celebrate the Communist Party. Stalin wished to replace the church with a new structure taller than the Empire State Building, and capped with a gilded statue of Lenin taller than the Statue of Liberty, but the "Man of Steel's" mad scheme never came to fruition. Although the first phase was completed (the dynamiting was the easy bit), the construction never took place as necessary resources were diverted to fighting World War II. After Stalin died, his successorNikita Khrushchevordered a large swimming pool built where the cathedral had stood. Old women who remembered the original cathedral could be seen standing at the edge of the swimming pool, praying to forgotten icons. Recently Yury Luzhkov, Moscow's autocratic mayor, tried to make up for Stalin's mess by ordering the construction of a tacky reproduction of the original cathedral using precast concrete.

_06:: The World's Largest

Hydrogen Bomb

Truth is always stranger than fiction, so it's no wonder that Stanley Kubrick's absurd comedy Dr. Strangelove is actually premised on fact. The strange truth here was that Nikita Khrushchev and company had actually been plotting to build a "doomsday" device. The plan called for a large cargo s.h.i.+p anch.o.r.ed off the Soviet Union's east coast to be loaded with hundreds of hydrogen bombs. If at any point the radiation detectors aboard the s.h.i.+p measured a certain amount of atmospheric radiation, indicating that the Soviet Union had been attacked, the bombs would detonate. Soviet scientists persuaded Khrushchev to drop this mad scheme. He did, however, order the construction of the world's largest nuclear bomb in 1961, the so-called "Czar Bomba" ("King of Bombs"), which weighed in at about 100 megatonsequivalent to 100 million tons of TNT. The largest nuclear test involved a smaller version of "Czar Bomba" that measured somewhere between 50 and 57 megatonsthe Soviets weren't sure themselves.

Touch of Evil Sociologists, historians, and cultural theorists have all written about the Soviet obsession with making things as big as possible, whether they be factories, vehicles, cities, dams, bombs, farms, or anything else. The large size was intended to convey the might, authority, and technical expertise of the Soviet Union, especially in comparison with capitalist countries.

_07:: World's Largest Icebreaker,

the Yamal

And it's the world's only nuclear-powered icebreaker at that! Confronted with the world's largest piece of icethe Arctic Oceanthe Soviets had no intention of letting nature stand in their way. So, they came up with a simple solution: the world's largest icebreakers. The first included the Lenin and Arktika cla.s.s of nuclear-powered icebreakers, introduced in 1959 and 1975, respectively. The Arktika icebreakers had not one but two nuclear reactors, powering 75,000-horsepower engines. None compare with the newest vessel, howeverthe Yamallaunched in 1993. Also powered by two nuclear reactors, it measures in at 490 feet long, displacing 23,000 tons of water, with a crew of 150 and an armored steel hull 4.8 centimeters thick. Recently reoutfitted for tourist operations, it has 50 luxury cabins, a library, lounge, theater, bar, volleyball court, gymnasium, heated indoor swimming pool, and saunas. A helicopter is stationed on the s.h.i.+p to conduct reconnaissance of ice formations.

A Gentleman Never Tells:

5 Bodies That've Never Been Found

It's tough to have a real first-cla.s.s funeral, especially when the guest of honor doesn't seem to show up. And whether the following five individuals are smiling down from above or quietly smirking about their fake demises, none of their bodies made it to the lost-and-found box.

_01:: Ambrose Bierce (18421914?) He was wounded during the Civil War, drank with fellow journalists Mark Twain and H. L. Mencken, and kept a human skull on his desk. Bierce was also a devilishly fine writer who lampooned and skewered just about everyone in the American public eye during the last half of the 19th century. One thing he wasn't, however, was found. In late 1913, Bierce went to Mexico to cover the country's revolution. What happened to him when he got there is a mystery. Theories include: he was killed at the Battle of Ojinaga; he was executed by the revolutionary leader Pancho Villa; he shot himself at the Grand Canyon. Any of those ends would have doubtless suited Bierce. Death by bullet, he wrote before leaving for Mexico, "beats old age, disease, or falling down the cellar stairs."

_02:: Joseph F. Crater (1889????) On the evening of August 6, 1930, a New York Supreme Court a.s.sociate justice stepped into a New York City taxiand became a synonym for "missing person." When Crater didn't show up for court on August 25, a ma.s.sive search was launched. But no trace of the judge was ever found. There were reports he was killed by the jealous boyfriend of a chorus girl, or by crooked politicians who feared what Crater knew. Conversely, there were rumors that he fled the country to avoid a judicial corruption probe. After 10 years, Crater was declared dead. But by then he'd already become a staple of pop culture: Groucho Marx would sometimes end his nightclub act by saying he "was stepping out [to] look for Judge Crater."

_03:: Amelia Earhart (18971937?) It was the second time around when Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, took off in May 1937 to try to circle the world in a custom-built twin-engine plane. A first effort by the famed aviatrix ended in a crash in Hawaii. Undaunted, however, Earhart had completed all but the last three legs of her second journey when the world last heard from her on July 2, and investigations into her fate have been almost ceaseless since then. U.S. government officials say she crashed at sea. Others claim she died on a South Pacific island, was captured and executed by the j.a.panese military, or lived out her life as a housewife in New Jersey.

_04:: Glenn Miller (19041944?) On December 15, 1944, it was so foggy that Miller reportedly joked, "Even the birds are grounded." Still, the famed bandleader, who had joined the U.S. Army in 1942, boarded a small plane in Bedford, England, bound for Paris to prepare for a troop concert. He never made it. Depending on your level of credulity: the plane crashed in the English Channel; it was knocked down by Allied planes jettisoning bombs before landing; he was killed by the n.a.z.is while on a secret mission; or he died of a heart attack in a Paris brothel. The big money, though, is apparently on the bomb theory. A Royal Air Force logbook indicating "friendly fire" as the cause of Miller's demise sold for about $30,000 at a 1999 auction.

_05:: Harold Holt (19081967?) On December 17, 1967, the ocean was all motion off Portsea, Victoria, but Australian politician Harold Holt, known as the "sportsman prime minister," plunged into the surf anyway. The man had been PM for only two years, but sadly, he never came out, and an intensive search failed to turn up a trace. The result? 38 years of rumors: had Holt committed suicide; been a.s.sa.s.sinated by the CIA; been eaten by a shark; or had he swum out to a waiting Chinese submarine and been spirited away? Without a body, no inquest was held at the time. But in 2004, a change in Australian law prompted a formal inquiry to formally close the case of the missing PM. The ruling? A lackl.u.s.ter verdict to say the least: death by drowning.

Touch of Evil In a 2003 episode of TV's Mythbusters, New York Giants coach Jim Fa.s.sel revealed that there was a "b.u.mp" at the 10-yard line near the south end zone of Giants Stadium, where many thought that missing labor leader Jimmy Hoffa's body had been buried. Radar indications showed nothing.

A Big Tower? What an Eiffel Idea!

4 Structures Built as Symbols of National Pride

Sure, any old nation can prove its global might by going out and subjugating the people of an inferior culture, but which of them can simply hint at their supremacy with a piece of art? A few, actually. The following structures weren't constructed just to insinuate their peoples' greatness to the rest of the world; they were meant to flat out proclaim it.

_01:: Colossus of Rhodes In the third century BCE, the Macedonians had been laying siege to the Greek city-state of Rhodes for about a year when they finally decided that the war was too expensive and called it off. Failing to clean up after themselves, the Macedonians littered the landscape with various siege machines, which the enterprising Rhodesians made use of by selling off the equipment. Then they used their newfound cash to build a mammoth statue of the sun G.o.d Helios to commemorate their victory. The hollow bronze statue, which at 105 feet was not quite as high as the Statue of Liberty, took 12 years to complete. The Colossus stood tall for almost 60 years, until it was felled by an earthquake. Then it took to relaxing, lying around for about another 875 years, until the Arabs invaded Rhodes and sold off the statue's remains. Rhodes's scholars claim it took 900 camels to haul the Colossus away.

_02:: The Eiffel Tower Vilified in the media as a monstrosityone critic called it "a metal asparagus"the Eiffel Tower wasn't supposed to stay up very long after it was built. In fact, it was offered for sale as sc.r.a.p. It was spared only because the French army found its height made it an excellent communications tower. But Gustav Eiffel's 984-foot-high tribute to the 100th anniversary of the French Revolution welcomed its 200-millionth visitor in 2002, and has become one of the most recognizable man-made landmarks in the world. Constructed as the main attraction of the 1889 International Exposition, the tower was also the impetus behind the main draw at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Eager to one-up the French, the Americans unveiled a giant amus.e.m.e.nt ride named after its inventorGeorge Ferris.

_03:: Mount Rushmore Meet America's greatest rock group: George, Tom, Abe, and Teddy. But how exactly did this presidential summit come about? And more important, why South Dakota? The fact is, a South Dakota state historian had a big idea in 1924: turn a cliff in the Black Hills into a tribute to heroes of the Old West. And sculptor John Gutzon de la Mothe Borglum liked the idea, but not the choice of subjects. So, the idea morphed a little, and a quartet of presidential busts was opened to the public in October 1941. Mount Rushmore, which cost about $1 million to build and is the largest American artwork ever created, attracts 27 million visitors a yeareven though it was never finished. America got into World War II and funds ran dry. That's why Lincoln is missing an ear. Either that or that's van Gogh up there.

_04:: The Petronas Towers Statues as national monuments are so pa.s.se, at least in Malaysia. The Petronas Towers, financed by the country's nationalized oil company and a private developer, are basically very tall office buildings, with a twist. They were built quite consciously as symbols of national pride. "We are showing the world we are a developing, industrialized country," the towers' chief operating officer told the a.s.sociated Press in 1995. To make sure the world was listening, though, the builders added spires to the towers to ensure they would be the world's tallest buildings. At 1,483 feet, they surpa.s.sed the Sears Tower in Chicago. Not to be outdone, however, in 2003, a spire was placed atop the Taipei 101 (Taipei Financial Center) building, in Taipei, Taiwan, just so it tiptoed above the Malaysian structures. And while Taiwan's building may have inched its way taller on a technicality, the view of Kuala Lumpur is still better at the Petronas.

I Want To See My Face in It:

5 World Leaders Obsessed with Their Own Images