This time coming to us from our ‘steemed colleague, Ace.

Obama Officially Opens the Ozymandias Presidential Center As Subcontractors Complain That He Didn’t Pay Them and Left Them With Millions in Worthless IOUs
—Disinformation Expert Ace

The “Ozymandias Presidential Center”? Oh my God, I can’t stop laughing—I LOVE it! I assure you you’ll be seeing that one again here, folks—assuming, of course, that I ever do see fit to even mention Bathhouse Barry’s ego-ziggurat again. Which, y’know, I might very well not.

For any who might not be aware whence this all comes:

The banker and political writer Horace Smith spent the Christmas season of 1817–1818 with Percy and Mary Shelley. At this time, members of their literary circle would sometimes challenge each other to write competing sonnets on a common subject: Shelley, John Keats, and Leigh Hunt wrote competing sonnets about the Nile around the same time. Shelley and Smith both chose a passage from the writings of the Greek historian Diodorus Siculus in Bibliotheca historica, which described a massive Egyptian statue and quoted its inscription: “King of Kings Ozymandias am I. If any want to know how great I am and where I lie, let him outdo me in my work.” In Shelley’s poem, Diodorus has been replaced by “a traveller from an antique land” whom Shelley metaphorically “met”.

Shelley wrote the poem around Christmas 1817—either in December that year or early January 1818. The poem was published on 11 January 1818 under the pen name “Glirastes” in The Examiner, a weekly paper published by Leigh’s brother John Hunt in London. Hunt admired Shelley’s poetry, and published many of his other works, such as The Revolt of Islam, in The Examiner. Shelley’s pen name meant “lover of dormice”, “Dormouse” being his pet name for his spouse, author Mary Shelley.

That would of course be Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley of Frankenstein; or The Modern Prometheus fame, one of the very first sci-fi works. The sonnet in question, which I’ve dug ever since I first read it in Mrs Becky Thompson’s Advanced English class back in high screwl:

I met a traveller from an antique land
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

— Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Ozymandias”, 1819 edition

Good stuff, no?