Wiki-Earthing Finds Tower Terror

I've embarked on a crash course of Islamic urban design for work recently. It's been eye opening, let's say, in more ways than one. But it begs the question - why go to an area of the world that's ripping itself apart and exceedingly anti-American when I can do it from my home computer ala Al Bundy?! Hands in pants (I'll steam clean the keyboard later babe) with a Bud heavy cracked while the Sox beat up on the Angels in the background. Enter Wiki-Earthing, my nerdy term for Wiki-surfing while flying around in Google Earth.

It's basically marrying the two most over-saturated information sources on the web - Wikipedia results from Google searches in map form (sorry Bing). In any event, try it. 

There are some amazing places that now, after wiki-earthing, I've added to my list of "vacation spots I'll never be able to go to because I'm poor." Ahh to be young. Casablanca, Fez, Rabat, Cairo, Algiers are all on my ever expanding list. The good can include places like Muizz Street in Cairo pictured below. 

The bad? Well let's just say Dubai and Doha aren't the only places in the Arab world putting up ugly buildings. Behold, the world's most terrifying attempt at architecture since the Experience Music Project.

Presenting the Abraj Al Bait Towers or its more affectionate name the Mecca Royal Clock Hotel Tower in Mecca, Saudi Arabia. Clearly the builders were thinking about ways to upstage (read overwhelm) the holiest site in the Muslim world, Masjid al-Haram. Lovely. The largest building in the world (by floor area) the largest clock in the world and the largest bunch of A-hole builders to ever shit on Mecca. It's Big Ben meets "Damn that's a huge bitch" multiplied by 900. Muslims don't need to turn towards Mecca everyday, they are suck in by that monstrosity's gravitational pull. I would say more but I'm still speechless.