Look, when it comes to the corpse flower obsession train, we are completely on board.

But a blooming that's been delayed or ongoing very, very slowly (in the Houston Museum of Natural Science's view) since at least Tuesday, the fact that horticulturist Zac Stayton has started giving Lois hormones (via banana by incision) and the museum's decision to close at midnight tonight for nine hours leaves us wondering.

What if this giant flower — which has spawned T-shirts, pins, decorative tiles, a webcam viewed by thousands, a fake twitter account and record attendance during all hours — never lets her/his petals down?

Then things would really start to stink.

While we still believe in the not-so-little corpse flower that could, we've compiled the top five big buildups that ended with a fizzle instead of a bang.

5. Maginot Line

Building a strong line of defense on the border with a historically bellicose neighbor is a pretty good idea. But in the case of France in the 1930s, one key detail was overlooked: The Germans, rather than fighting through the armaments, could simply go around them by gliding through neutral Belgium and the Netherlands. When the Germans did exactly that, France was left exposed and the invasion was complete in a matter of weeks.

And 70 years later, the jokes about French pansies are still going strong.

4. Edsel

In the 1950s, before the Big Three was the Almost-Bankrupt Three, Ford made a major push with a $400 million investment in a new mid-range line: Edsel. Ford, Lincoln and Mercury dealers across the country switched to the Edsel banner after a televised launch announcement called The Edsel Show, so ballyhooed Ford execs called it "E-Day."

Edsel was referred to as an entirely new kind of car. In reality, it was just another brand on the Ford and Mercury body frames with some quality issues and a particularly garish grill that was compared to a horse collar and a toilet seat. After three years, Ford had sold only 84,000 Edsels, with 63,000 of them coming in the first year. Ford lost $350 million in the venture ($1.6 billion in today's money).

3. Hurricane Rita

We understand that a month after Hurricane Katrina ravaged New Orleans, hurricanes were a very, very scary thing. But flood-prone as Houston is, we aren't living on a low-lying isthmus between the ocean and a lake. But that didn't stop the largest evacuation in U.S. history, stranding millions without gas or food on clogged interstates for up to 36 hours.

While the damage in East Texas was significant, Houstonians responded with what can only be termed lunacy, especially as the storm turned and headed to the Texas-Louisiana border, where it eventually made landfall. After all the drama, Hurricane Rita killed nine in East Texas, but at least 28 people died in the evacuation.

2. Y2K

The world's financial systems grinding to a halt. Planes falling out of the sky. Truly, there was no destruction the millennium bug, or Y2K, was not rumored to cause, all the result of some lazy programmer only wanting to type two digits of the year instead of four.

After $300 billion spent in preparation for the glitch, January 1 brought nothing other than a collective hangover. In the U.S., issues were limited to the Naval Observatory clock and 150 slot machines in Delaware. In 2003, the Wall Street Journal called Y2K an "end of the world cult" and the "hoax of the century."

1. Al Capone's Vault

Hotel renovations are expensive, so it's no surprise that when businessmen renovating Chicago's Lexington Hotel in the 1980s discovered hidden tunnels and escape routes from the room once used as a headquarters by notorious gangster Al Capone — decided they wanted to make the most of it.

Rather than opening up the mysterious vault rumored to hold Capone's treasure and letting historians see if the cache was noteworthy, the contents were unveiled live in television in 1986 with 30 million people watching worldwide and Geraldo Rivera breathlessly drawing out the drama.

What treasure did it hold? Umm ... some trash and empty bottles. And Geraldo's been, well, Geraldo ever since.