Golf
The Gangajalis are two enormous silver urns made for Maharaja Sawai Madho Singh II of Jaipur. Travelling to England for Edward VII’s coronation in 1902, he brought thousands of litres of water from the Ganges rather than drink foreign water. Each vessel was formed from thousands of melted silver coins without soldering and weighs around 340 kilograms empty.
Guérewol is an annual courtship festival held by the Wodaabe, nomadic cattle herders of Niger and the wider Sahel. Men spend hours applying red, yellow and white pigments, arranging beads and feathers, then dance in long lines while singing and exaggerating their expressions. The display can continue for hours beneath the desert sun. Women act as judges, selecting the men they find most beautiful. In Guérewol, male beauty is neither private nor effortless. It is painted, rehearsed and subjected to public review.
Gbadolite is a city in northern Democratic Republic of the Congo and the ancestral home of Mobutu Sese Seko, who ruled the country—then called Zaire—from 1965 to 1997. Mobutu transformed the remote settlement into his personal capital, complete with three palaces, a five-star hotel, hospital, Coca-Cola plant and a 3,200-metre runway built to receive chartered Concordes from Europe. Foreign leaders were entertained among marble, fountains and Chinese pagodas in what became known as the “Versailles of the Jungle.” When Mobutu fell in 1997, the palaces were looted and abandoned. Vegetation entered the ballrooms and the airport nearly emptied.
Muammar Gaddafi was Libya’s ruler from 1969 to 2011 and an unusually committed practitioner of political theatre. On foreign visits, he often received dignitaries inside a large Bedouin tent, presenting it as a connection to his desert upbringing. The tent travelled to Brussels, Moscow, Rome and Paris, where it was erected in palace gardens and surrounded by security, communications equipment and Gaddafi’s considerable entourage. Its greatest difficulty came in New York in 2009. Central Park refused it, New Jersey objected and officials ordered it removed from an estate owned by Donald Trump for violating local regulations.
Gordonstoun is a boarding school in Scotland. Three generations of British royalty were educated at Gordonstoun, including the Duke of Edinburgh and the Prince of Wales. Seamanship has been a main part of the curriculum since the school began.
TV Party was a cult public-access television cable TV show in New York City that ran from 1978 to 1982. Guests on the show included Mick Jones, David Byrne, Debbie Harry, James Chance, Klaus Nomi, Charles Rocket, and Jean-Michel Basquiat.
Giant spider webs are the product of arachnids working together.
The Beautiful Boy is a book by Germaine Greer. It's a study of the youthful male face and form, from antiquity to the present day, from paintings and drawings to statuary and photographs.
The Great Man-Made River is a network of pipes that supplies water to the Sahara Desert in Libya. It is the world's largest irrigation project. According to its website, it is the largest underground network of pipes (2820 km) and aqueducts in the world. It consists of more than 1,300 wells, most more than 500 m deep, and supplies 6,500,000 m3 of fresh water per day to the cities of Tripoli, Benghazi, Sirt and elsewhere. Muammar al-Gaddafi has described it as the Eighth Wonder of the World.
Jean-Paul Goude is a French graphic designer, illustrator, photographer who has made some of the most iconic images of the 20th and 21st century.