Turkmenbashi is Dead Long Live the Next Guy!

Saparmurat Niyazov the nutty leader of Turkmenistan is finally dead after 21 years of rule. this is quite significant because that country contains the third largest amount of natural gas in the world and is pretty much unexplored. These are some of this guys weird acts:

A massive golden statue of a leader known as Turkmenbashi rotates to
face the sun in the capital Ashgabat, just one of many ostentatious gestures
towards his own self-regard. All children must learn a book he wrote, weaving
medieval fantasy tales with his philosophy of life.

In perhaps his most notorious gesture, the book was blasted into
space in a Russian rocket and then burned up on re-entry over the Earth, so that
the Turkmen people could look up at the skies and think of their leader's
writings for inspiration, rather than the stars.

Yup they paid money to blast a book into space and have it burn up so he can have their eyes on him instead of the stars. In other words he was trying to outdo the stars. He sounds like Dr. Doom.