That unaccountably baffling stumper, Who’s buried in Grant’s Tomb, would have far fewer scratching their noggins had the General’s handlers had the foresight of Kim Jong-il’s. The dead North Korean’s coterie will fly a team of Russian embalming experts to Pyonyang this week to ensure that the Dear Leader’s corpse and visage will be forever on display. (The Russians will take a break from corpse-sitting an embalmed Lenin, who will tolerate their absence, having had an electric pump placed inside his body to maintain humidity.) Jong-il will lie next to his father, founder of the country, whose body has been encased in glass for all to see since 1994.
So North Korea’s Groucho, whoever that turns out to be, will never get a chuckle out of Who’s Buried in Jong-il’s Tomb?, whether his eyebrows can work a crowd or not. Anyone who doesn’t know can simply have a look. But Grant? His magnificent granite and marble edifice on Manhattan’s Upper West Side is the largest mausoleum in North America. An astonishing 90,000 people donated $600,000 (19th century dollars) to its construction, the largest public fundraising effort in history at the time, and over a million people attended its dedication. Yet on the list of things to see in New York, the tomb sits pretty far down the list. Yet if you could still see the man…