lost and found

Somehow I've been pulled into the vast web that is Lost viewing. And if you want to, you can get pulled in further and further thanks to a bunch of websites that only seek to confuse you further. I really don't have any interest in getting to involved in that, but somehow my follow-up Lost research (was the statue the foot of The Colossus of Rhodes? Probably not.) led me to Wikipedia again, where I started reading up about the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.

The seven wonders (the Great Pyramid of Giza, Hanging Gardens of Babylon, Statue of Zeus at Olympia, Temple of Artemis, Mausoleum of Maussollos, Colossus of Rhodes, and Lighthouse of Alexandria) are actually sort of boring. That's not to say they're not impressive, but none of them are as cool as the world's largest pendulum clock (inside a building in Tokyo), or even Indianapolis' largest Mr. Bendo (who knew there were so many?).

The 21 official candidates on the new Seven Modern Wonders of the World list are much cooler. Now I might just be saying that because I've been to Kiyomizu-dera, and it's on the list, or perhaps I just find the Great Wall a little more impressive than a status of Zeus.

No matter how you structure the argument, I think it's easy to see those olden-timers got nothing on us. In fact, I think it's entirely possible that we've got seven Indianapolis wonders as impressive as the Hanging Gardens of Babylon (which don't even really hang). For example, who can deny the wonders of The Cancer Row Dumps That Smell Like Dog Food of the Near South Side*? Or the Neverending Construction of the Central Library?

Take that, Lighthouse of Alexandria.



Footnotes

*"An Indianapolis census tract southwest of Downtown that lies between White River and Belmont Avenue had a (cancer) risk of 274 in a million." This article (Indy Star), about half way down the page.