Google Earth Community: Do you have something quirky to post?

I’ll bet you do! I’ll bet you (like me) spend a lot of time on Google Earth just playing around, trying out different stuff.

If you’ve got something kinda weird, something you made when you were just playing around, why not post it here?

Every year 1,000,000 Americans undergo Extracorporeal Shock Wave Lithotripsy, a procedure in which focused sound waves are used to shatter stone-like deposits in internal organs, primarily in the kidneys and urinary ducts. I don’t know what the international numbers are, but I’ve recently been adding to them. I figure it beats being cut open, but it’s rather uncomfortable.

I sent an email to one of best friends back home in Arizona, who has been kind enough to follow with a certain interest my passive exploration of this amazing technology. After I mailed, I went to Google Earth and began nosing around some of the places I talked about in my letter. (Now my friend, although he is one of the best read and most widely traveled people I know, is – shall we say – Digitally Unenlightened. His computer is so old that it runs a version of Windows that I don’t think even has a number after it. He only uses it for email, which he seems to check about once a week.)

As I was nosing around my favorite haunts, it occurred to me that if my friend had a decent computer that could run GE, I might have written my letter in a different way, as an attached KMZ. And so I set about to play with that notion.

While I was having fun, a mail arrived from him. As usual, his letter was much more interesting than mine, and so as I continued to play, I worked part of his letter into my little project.

Using Google Earth to write email is probably a pretty dumb idea, but if there’s one thing the pair of us have in common, it’s the cultivation of a certain quirkiness of mind (if not of character) and I think if he had a way to see this post, he might be amused. You may not be, but you might be interested in the way I’ve used OFT (open and fly to) to control the pace of the narrative. Actually, all of the links are just FLY TO; the one link where I attempted to open a balloon as I flew to it, didn’t work, but I think that’s because the links are from Earth to Sky and back, and I suspect that there’s no way to do that.

If you find my narrative a bit of a bore, just click on through. I think my friend’s musings are pretty interesting, and, although the places he talks about are already well marked, probably worthy of a real post in one of the forums.

I’ve hired a stand-in for myself. She’s been in repose in the back yard of my old house in Phoenix for a couple of years, ever since I first started to try to understand how to make ground overlays. I’m sure some of you will prefer to look at her than me. But as a disclaimer, I am not endorsing her choice of attire in a place so prone to receiving mosquito bites and high-altitude sunburns.

So, do you have something goofier than this? If so, I’d like to see it!

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