The Angry Pen here, and I got a beef with the city of Birmingham and the makers of Microsoft Expedia travel software. I remember the exact moment when we discovered it. We were on our way into New Orleans on I-10 and Mike had Dave's Roadside America book out, searching for the next piece of kitsch we might want to pull over and take a gander at. When he got to Alabama, he found an entry for "The World's Tallest Iron Man. (p. 128)" Now I don't know what you think of when you hear those words, but we were hoping for a giant steel robot with huge pincers for hands and lasers shooting out of his eyeballs. We didn't get that, but that's not my complaint. It turns out that the "Tallest Iron Man" is actually a 56-foot statue of Vulcan, the Roman God of Fire, cast in Iron for the St. Louis World's Fair in 1904. I guess at some point after the fair closed, the good people of St. Louis realized they no longer wanted a 56-foot cast iron eye sore, and Birmingham was in the market for something that qualified as a "world's tallest" to attract folks like us. (Here's a picture from Roadside America's website to show you what it's supposed to look like.) Well, despite the fact that the statue was not likely to break free of its 124-foot pedestal and stampede across the city, breathing fire across the land and vaporizing the populace with its eye lasers, we're suckers for anything labeled "World's ______-est", and decided to check it out… which is where our troubles began. There are two ways you can look stuff up on our computer-based navigation software; you can look up the address in the info section and try to find that address on the streetmap, or you can have the software place a dot at the site's location, and just drive to the dot. The dots hadn't failed us to this point, so we found the dot for the Tall Iron Dude, at the corner of Dixon and Oglesby, and drove there. Our first sign that we might be in trouble came when Mike said "OK now, take the next left and it should be right there." When he said that, we were on a rutted two-lane road (which might as well have been dirt) in the middle of a tiny little subdivision sunken into a deep valley. No statue. Not much of anything actually. Well hell. Mike figured out pretty quickly that we'd been screwed by Expedia's software, and looked up the address, which turned out to be across town. We got on the highway which we hoped would take us where we needed to go. But we missed the exit, almost exclusively because there was no sign marking the street we were looking for. So, after giving Mike fair warning that he had one more chance to get us to the statue, we went a few miles up and doubled back. This time we found the exit (no thanks to Birmingham, which again, failed to mark the street. I only found it because I saw a sign for Vulcan Park out of the corner of my eye, and took a guess.) At the bottom of the exit ramp, there was no sign to tell us if Vulcan Park was to the left, or to the right. What do you think are the chances that we chose correctly? So, after making another U-turn, we finally found the park, which had a sign out front saying it was closed. "No problem," we thought, "we don't need to go in, we just want to take a picture of "Mr. Tin", how hard can that be? I mean he's 56 feet tall for God's sake!" So we went up to the park. There was the gate, and beyond it, the 124-foot pedestal, which we recognized from the book. "Hey," we thought, "this might work out after all." I was concentrating on navigating the narrow road, so I didn't see what Mike saw. But I did hear him say "Uh, Lars… where's the statue?" That's right folks… Vulcan was gone! We don't know why, where, or how. I mean, there's got to be something REALLY wrong with a 56-foot iron statue for you to want to move it, right? What happened, they woke up one morning and realized St. Louis had sold them a statue that was flipping them the bird!? I'm not sure who to blame here. The book is old, and it's not like we called ahead to see if the statue was still there (though who would think to do THAT, I can't imagine). I think that Expedia (which includes construction and other changes in its software) should have known that Mr. Vulcan was currently unavailable. Is it possible that Birmingham did have the park marked with signs and took them down because the statue was gone? Maybe, but I say that's not good enough. What if you found out about the statue in a book, like we did? Who's going to drive into Birmingham and say to themselves, "Hmmm, I don't see any signs for the world's tallest Iron Man. I think that must mean that Birmingham somehow moved their gigantic-ass statue to some other location?" No! Nobody's that prescient. I think putting "closed" stamps over the existing signs would have made more sense. So even if the city was trying to help us out, I still say they screwed us in the end. And here we were trying to bring a few tourist dollars to their fair city. C'mon guys… work with us here! -Angry Pen, out.