Okay, since everyone took a pass on triviality Friday, maybe I can suggest a topic for today. The News & Observer’s Travel section yesterday featured a project to select “The New Seven Wonders of the World”. You can read the idea on the website of the sponsoring organization here.

Now, besides being the best junket project I ever heard (“First we go to Angor Wat; next we’ll visit the Taj Mahal; etc.”) it’s worth a thought or two. Of the twenty-one finalist sites still in the voting race, what do you think?

For my part, I would definitely include the Great Wall for sheer magnitude, the pyramids for longevity (the last of the original Seven still extant), and the Eiffel Tower for its significance proving the concept of high-rise ironwork.

I would not include Bavaria’s Neuschwanstein castle; as beautiful as it is, and as much I loved it both times we visited, it’s no more authentic as an example of medieval chateaux than Disneyland’s Cinderella Castle it inspired.

And if the Sydney Opera House is included, I wonder what happened to the Panama or Suez Canals, any of the recent “world’s highest skyscrapers”, or major civil engineering feats like Hoover or Aswan Dams (or soon to be, the Three Gorges Dam in China). Maybe they were in the original 77 nominations.