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Today is Leif Ericson Day, an occasion to celebrate the achievements of that valiant Norse explorer (approx 970-1020), most notably being the first European to set foot on the North American continent, likely somewhere near the tip of what is now Newfoundland. Given his broad region of influence–Iceland, Norway, Greenland, North America–you might find celebrations [...]

Of all the world’s massive and mysterious monuments, the easiest to copy (save perhaps the pyramids) must be Stonhenge – provided you ignore the problem of how its multiple-ton blocks were lifted into place before modern machinery. Regardless, recent replicas abound. Inexplicably, the great Pi Stonehenge (also known as Stonehenge 3.141…) was left out of [...]

If you watch many disaster movies, you’ll have noticed that big buildings and famous landmarks are often the first thing to go when the meteorite/earthquake/tidal wave/dinosaur/mutant/giant monkey/aliens hit. Aside from always targeting certain cities rather than others, some monuments just cannot catch a break. There’s the Eiffel Tower, for instance, which gets it in Armageddon [...]

We’d like to say that it qualifies as some kind of public performance art, like defacing some symbolic monument whose legacy you disagree with (like the scene in Life of Brian where the titular Messiah defaces the Roman temple), but really the practice of pretending to have sex with statues is just an obvious and [...]

After decades obsessed with excess, grandeur and maximum bang for our bucks, perhaps we’re entering the era of the miniature. In a world of boundless consumption, obscene things like the world’s largest non-stick frying pan were a telling – if monstrous – monument to excess.
Well, before we start working on the world’s smallest non-stick frying [...]

Some time ago, in an earlier edition of our weekly psychoanalysticle Freudian Fridays, we looked at some of the most overt, excessive and unsubtle phallic monuments built by man. While the need to put power, potency and might into concrete (and steel and glass) expression smacks of typical late-capitalist chauvinism, it would be a mistake [...]