»All that glitters.

The Travel channel is doing a countdown of the Top 10 bridges. At #1 is of course the beautiful Golden Gate, but somehow I feel that's a gimme.

The narrator sums up the magic of this bridge with a vapid statistic: "Enough custom International Orange paint to cover the White House 17 1/2 times over!"

This program has less substance than the WGBH series on engineering fun:
Building Big; the web site has sections on bridges! dams! tunnels! hot damn!

The Travel Channel's Top 10:

1. Golden Gate Bridge
2. Akashi Kaiyko Bridge (Kobe, which is the reason it's Nr 2 and not Nr 1)
3. Sunshine Skyway Bridge (St. Petersburg? -- if so, I'll never see it!)
4. Tower Bridge
5. Firth of Forth Bridge
6. Brooklyn Bridge
7. Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel
8. Sydney Harbour Bridge
9. Leonard P. Zakim Bridge
10. London Bridge (Lake Havasu)

Their top-ten list skipped over nostalgic and beautiful bridges such as the Charles in Prague; the Pont Neuf in Paris; the inestimable convergence of bridges in Pittsburgh, PA; the Bridge of Sighs in Venezia; the Ponte Vecchio in Firenze; the peculiar gondola bridge in Bilbo; the imagined bridge between Sicilia and the mainland.

And what about canals? In its way, the Suez is a bridge between the Red Sea and the Mediterranean, as proud an engineering achievement as the Brooklyn or the Golden Gate.