um, did everyone already know about this?

am I the last the hear about this? I feel like I should've known about "Potemkin village," but it probably is one of those things that just totally misses me and I've never heard about (i.e. never seeing star wars, not seeing daria, etc -- oh wait, maybe it's just tv/movie stuff. nevermind.).

anyways, here is what wikipedia says:

Potemkin villages were purportedly fake settlements erected at the direction of Russian minister Grigori Aleksandrovich Potemkin to fool Empress Catherine II during her visit to Crimea in 1787. According to this story, Potemkin, who led the Crimean military campaign, had hollow facades of villages constructed along the desolate banks of the Dnieper River in order to impress the monarch and her travel party with the value of her new conquests, thus enhancing his standing in the empress's eyes.

Here is a modern example of what these things looked like (sort-of):

and here is the hot bitch that he did this for (she would make a good chola) -- no horses allowed:

there is a lot of controversy about whether or not this actually happened, but for those who believe it, there is also the theory that says that actually catherine probably knew they were fake and were actually for the benefit of the other bouge-y richies, but it still seems crazy to me.

Here are some uses in modernish-day speak:

"It's a lie, a huge Potemkin village designed to give North Korea the appearance of modernity."-- Kevin Sullivan, "Borderline Absurdity", Washington Post, January 11, 1998

"Unless U.S. imperial overstretch is acknowledged and corrected, the United States may someday soon find that it has become a Potemkin village superpower -- with a facade of military strength concealing a core of economic weakness."-- Christopher Layne, "Why the Gulf War Was Not in the National Interest", The Atlantic, July 1991