There I was just about finished a grand Google Earth-Dorseyland tour of the Seven Wonders of the World (all 332 of the them) and along comes some Swiss guy wanting to change everything. “Be part of the making of history!” screams his website, New7Wonders.com, and sure enough thousands of people are not just casting votes on his 21 nominees but donating buckets of money. (Suspiciously, the donors are mostly Chinese, no doubt hoping to grease the Great Wall’s way onto the new list.)

Apparently the people of the planet have a couple of hundred days left before the decision is rendered as to what constitutes the New Seven Wonders of the World. “This vote will culminate with a live, worldwide telecast on July 7, 2007,” says Bernard Weber, who bills himself as an “adventurer”, although I’m pretty sure it doesn’t say that on his passport.

He founded the New7Wonders Foundation in 2001 “to protect humankind’s heritage across the globe” and put up most of the front money for the first steps, which probably means the website.

Then the donors started pitching in their two cents’ worth, receiving in return “the right to a listing on the N7W Memorial Wall” and the promise that 50 per cent of all net revenue raised will fund site restorations.

Working out of Le Corbusier’s Heidi-Weber-Museum in Zurich, the campaign assembled the inevitable “panel of experts” to whittle down a list of 77 proposed sites to just 21.

President of the committee is Prof Federico Mayor of Spain, former director-general of Unesco, Argentine-American Cesar Pelli, architect of the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur and Canary Wharf in London, Pritzker Architecture Prize winners Zaha Hadid and Tadao Ando, the Chinese head of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Department of Architecture Yung Ho Chang, and South Africa’s first non-white architect, Aziz Tayob. Another panelist, Australian architect Harry Seidler, died in March.

Keep an eye out for a television series leading up to the big announcement telecast. That’s going to be really awful, isn’t it? I’m seeing a pair of celebrity emcees and a suspenseful countdown as the final votes are tallied, maybe with a star-studded choir singing “We Are the World” and poor people everywhere thinking, “What the f–?!”

And the nominees are:

* The Acropolis
* Angkor
* Christ the Redeemer statue
* The Colosseum
* Easter Island
* Eiffel Tower
* Great Wall of China
* Hagia Sophia
* Machu Picchu
* Petra
* Pyramids of Giza
* Statue of Liberty
* Stonehenge
* Sydney Opera House
* Taj Mahal

Well, we’ve been to all those places, but the ones remaining on the list are “new”, so to speak:

The Alhambra, or Red Castle, is a sprawling palace and fortress complex in Granada, southern Spain, renowned for its stunning frescoes and other interior details, one of the best examples of Moorish architecture anywhere.

Chichen Itzá has nothing to do with spicy chicken. It’s a site in Mexico’s Yucatan that boasts the pyramid of Kukulcan, aka El Castillo, arguably the greatest of all Mayan temples.

The Kiyomizu Temple in Kyoto, Japan, translates as “Clear Water Temple”. The present buildings were constructed in 1633, including the main hall famed for its great veranda and supported by hundreds of pillars, with waterfall of three streams on hillside beneath from which visitors drink for the healing properties.

This what Timbuktu, or Timbukto, in Mali looks like. Hmm. When you get to it, you see things like the house in the picture below.

The, uh, city was founded in the 12th century, and there’s good reason its name was always cropping up in old movies and Bugs Bunny cartoons: It was one of wealthiest places in the world, at the crossroads of four important caravan routes.

The Europeans kept hearing about it but could never find the blasted place, until Scottish explorer Gordon Laing won a prize offered by the Geographical Society of Paris in 1826 for being the first European to visit Timbuktu. Unfortunately he was murdered two days after leaving.

Neuschwanstein Castle keeps us in cartoon land because “Mad” King Ludwig II of Bavaria’s fetching folly of the late 19th century was the inspiration for the Sleeping Beauty Castle at Disneyland (no relation to Dorseyland).

Ludwig spent 17 years building his “New Swan Stone Castle” – which appears in the photo at the top of the post between Tom Hanks and his Wonderbread and Paris Hilton and her Wonderbra – then got dethroned for being a spendthrift. He drowned mysteriously in 1886 and the people declared the castle theirs.

More than just the seat of all evil, the Kremlin started out in 1156 as a new home for Ivan I. It became the place to boss people around from and even when the capital moved to St Petersburg, the tsars were crowned here. Now it’s Putin’s house.

One good thing might come out of all this New Wonders nonsense: Weber is planning on using some of his cash windfall on “the Bamiyan Buddha Reconstruction Project”.

The good old boys in the Taleban spun some heads in 2001 by blowing up the 55-metre-tall, fourth-century Buddha carvings in Bamiyan, Afghanistan. Now Weber and Paul Bucherer of the Bibliotheca Afghanica Foundation plan to rebuild it, and they’ve started with a 3D reconstruction and some promotion at the 2005 World Exhibition in Japan.

“This is dependant on the will of the Afghan people and the permission of the government,” the website says, pegging the cost at between $30 million and $50 million. The proponents say nothing about the debate over such proposals, which has as one of its most prickly points the fact that the statues are, um, irreplaceable. Superglue just won’t do.

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If you’re still wondering:

* Ancient Wonders
* Mediaeval Wonders
* Natural Wonders
* Underwater Wonders
* Modern Wonders
* Forgotten Wonders
* Endangered Wonders