Hamad bin Hamdan al Ahyan is a real-life Chairface Chippendale. He owns a private island near Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates, but what fun is that if everyone doesn't know it's yours? So he wrote his name on it, in letters a third of a mile long that are visible from space.
Al Ahyan, a member of the Abu Dhabi ruling family, owns the world's most expensive car (it has a caviar tray!), the world's largest truck (it has an apartment inside!), and seven Mercedes 500 SLs. So clearly he's not a super conservationist or anything. But turning an island into a walking allegory of the cavalier attitude that the super-rich have towards the Earth … that's pretty ballsy. It's not clear how he did it — dynamite? Backhoe? Just doing ceaseless wheelies in his Bugatti? — but my guess is that he has a phalanx of adorable endangered animals holding the dirt in place.
On Google Maps, the "Hamad" is upside down; al Ahyan apparently is slave to no man's conventions of north as "up." It's also so big that I almost passed right by it when looking for it, assuming I was hunting for something much smaller. Hey, when some people decide to leave a mark on the world that can be seen from space, they don't mess around.
