Head to Head Rankings

Seeing the sights can be several different kinds of experience, depending on the sights.  Sometimes, you can see something completely different from any thing you've seen before.  Other times, you can see the same thing, done in a slightly different way.  Still other times, you see things that start to look familiar.  In this last case, you may have no option but to rank the current sight against those you have seen in the past.  We have previously noted Anne's palace rankings (recap: Versailles is #1).  Today's edition: the best and worst others of obelisks.


For those of you who do not know, obelisks date back to ancient Egypt (or something) and were used by ancient peoples as either do some type of religious ritual to honor their deities (if you believe mainstream archaeology) or to communicate with aliens (if you watch too much of the History 2 channel)

So anyway, what possible criteria could we come up with to rank obelisks.  Well, that's easy.  Obviously, the Washington Monument in DC is going to win, so we just select the criteria that it has and use that as the criteria against which to measure all others.  So let's say (1) location, (2) whether Mark has toured inside of it and (3) document alien visits (3) whether it is a monument to George Washington.

So, to no one's surprise, the Washington Monument (pictured at the top of this post) finishes #1, largely because it aces criteria 2 and 3, with the only thing working against it being location (Washington is a nice place to visit, but let's be honest, it was built on a swamp).  So, how about the best of the rest.

The Good:

It's hard to argue against an obelisk in Vatican City, which brings a high score on criteria #1, location.  Although it totally fails on criteria #3 - not named after George - it gets partial credit for the tours because you can tour St. Peter's and all of that.

Ok, the obelisk pictured immediately above is located in Buenos Aires.  Since Anne, Mark and the HBomb are currently lived in the same city, it gets points for location.  Furthermore, if you are standing at this obelisk and look around to the storefronts on either side, you can see the Teatro Colon, one of the best theatres for acoustics ever built.  So that's pretty good.

Now let's move on to ...

the "others".

I don't remember where the obelisk pictured immediately above it located, so it is impossible to evaluate it on criteria #1: location.  It's score will have to remain incomplete.

Ok, so this bad boy was located in Istanbul but is originally from Egypt.  The location is not bad, but the thing working against this obelisk is the ancient hieroglyphs.  As anyone who reads ancient hieroglyph will immediately recognize, this has a typo

 This one is in England.  Too rainy.

And last, but not least, this one from Prague.  It is interesting, good location, but it looks like the roofing blew off.  That will always count against you in an obelisk beauty pageant.