The hopeless choose to do things in ways that crush the mind.
A 40-year-old car parts worker for Volkswagen and Audi was apparently suffering extreme work-related stress.
He decided to commit suicide. But he reportedly did it with painful precision and a heartbreaking consideration for the welfare of strangers.
The Telegraph reported that the man scoured Google Earth in order to find a suitable place to kill himself. Then he printed the images from the Web, images that police subsequently found in his car, the article said.
Widecombe-in-the-Moor, near the spot the Londoner reportedly chose to die.
(Credit: CC Dir2008/Flickr)No one will ever know why he chose Bone Hill Rocks parking lot in the Dartmoor National Park in Devon. No one can even begin to imagine what Google Earth showed him to make this the place where he would end his life.
Bone Hill Rocks was evidentaly 200 miles from the man's home in London.
However, he reportedly drove there, parked, fitted a plastic tube from his exhaust to the inside of his car and waited to die.
Yet still he thought of others. In order to protect passersby, those whom he didn't know, he placed warning signs on the windows, telling people not to open the doors or to get inside the car because of the fumes. He had even sealed the windows of his VW Golf with black tape.
The coroner, who recorded a verdict of suicide, reportedly said: "I am satisfied that (name withheld) planned this with expertise. The notices he had prepared were designed to be found by others after his death."
Lead roof tiles are worth a lot of money. And you'll find them, in the United Kingdom, at least, on the top of schools, museums, churches, and the Houses of Parliament.
I may be wrong about the last one, but Tom Berge, a man who truly appreciates the free part of free enterprise, knew where he could pinpoint such buildings: Google Earth.
He sat at his computer, googled away, selected his targets (mercifully, the roofs were unblurred), got into his car, and climbed less than socially toward his riches. He managed to collect about $140,000 worth of lead, which he sold to unsuspecting merchants.
This sign was, apparently, recently hung in front of the Honeywood Museum, one of Mr. Berge's targets. The museum does not appear to legislate for shoes on the roof.
(Credit: Cc Kevan)A friend of Berge revealed to the Telegraph: "He could tell the lead roofs apart on Google Earth, as they were slightly darker than normal."
Mr. Berge, aged a mere 27, pleaded guilty last week--no, not to an appreciation for official buildings, but rather to theft.
He received a less than leaden eight-month suspended jail sentence and 100 hours of community service. I wonder if he'll be asked to repair a few church roofs.
Who needs Google Earth when you've got Jill Wade's piercing eyes?
The great-grandmother from Devon, in southwest England, wandered out into her snowy garden and found marks that looked like they had been left by something with very strange cloven hoofs. A Budweiser Clydesdale that had, perhaps, lost its way on the way home from the pub?
Oh, no. These may well be the hoofprints of the devil.
The legend, as told in those parts, has Satan himself, on February 8, 1855, going on a 100-mile trek across the English countryside.
In case you're wondering what kind of hoof the devil possesses, just below his red ankles and to the left of his three-pronged fork--well, they're not exactly size 9s. They are 5 inches long, and the stride is somewhere between 11 and 17 inches.
Ms. Wade was truly stunned. Perhaps she thought the devil had returned to punish the United Kingdom for giving the world colonialism--or its modern incarnation, Gordon Ramsay.
If Ms. Wade had caught the devil red-legged, would this have been his face?
(Credit: CC Goodnight Photography)"I looked in the garden, and it really intrigued me. It was a complete blanket of snow--there was no other marks in the snow at all," she told the Telegraph.
In her perplexed and bedeviled state, Ms. Wade immediately called the Center for Fortean Zoology. The biologists apparently appreciated the similarity to the legendary devil's gait, but they remain unconvinced that Satan has been on a tour of Devon. However, they are featuring the images on their site. This is very suspicious.
Just as CNET's Caroline McCarthy smelled a rancid conspiracy when Atlantis appeared on Google Earth, so I feel the British are hiding something. (Oh, don't they always?)
I believe the world's foremost scientists should be immediately dispatched to England, together with some men of the cloth and the producers of "The Exorcist."
It looks like the plan of a Donald Trump luxury prison facility etched into the ocean's floor.
Yet some who have seen it on Google Earth believe that this could be, yes, finally, no, unequivocally the lost city of Atlantis. A city where no one ever dies, everyone partakes of libidinous orgies from dusk till dawn, Bobby Ewing hangs out, and the property taxes never rise above $500.
The "Sun" newspaper even winkled a quote from Dr. Charles Orser, curator of historical archaeology at the State University of New York: "The site is one of the most prominent places for the proposed location of Atlantis, as described by Plato. Even if it turns out to be geographical, this definitely deserves a closer look."
This is Atlantis (Nassau Branch). I cannot possibly say what happens within its walls.
(Credit: CC Heather 0714)It pains me to say that I am the winkler of bad tidings. For I have discovered the words of one of those excitement dampeners employed by Google official job title "spokesperson." The representative acknowledged that Google Earth had already been used to find such historical gems as an Ancient Roman villa.
However: "In this case, what users are seeing is an artifact of the data collection process. Bathymetric (or sea-floor terrain) data is often collected from boats using sonar to take measurements of the sea-floor...The lines reflect the path of the boat as it gathers the data. The fact that there are blank spots between each of these lines is a sign of how little we really know about the world's oceans."
Looking at the lines traced by these boats, might I suggest that their captains are thoroughly tested for performance-debilitating substances?
When you look closely, they do seem to trace rather wobbly paths. Perhaps one or two of the captains actually spotted Bobby Ewing and were momentarily stunned that he was still alive.
Some people log onto Google Earth and spy men sitting on the toilet. Others find buried treasures of a different kind.
At least that is the claim of Nathan Smith, a Los Angeles musician. Mr. Smith was noodling around on Google Earth one day, randomly examining parts of the Aransas Pass in Texas. Suddenly, his eyes darted to a shoeprint-shaped outline near Barketine Creek.
His suspicions and, presumably, his vast knowledge of history, were sufficiently aroused for him to believe that what he had found was the wreckage of a Spanish barquentine (think large boat with three or more masts) that supposedly met its final resting place south of Refugio, Texas, in 1822.
Mr. Smith scuttled off to consult a few experts and concluded the ship and its treasure was worth $3 billion. With all due promptness, he grabbed hold of a metal detector and drove all the way to the site. One small problem: the land appears to be part of a ranch owned by the late Morgan Dunn O'Connor.
You will feel palpitations in the deeper part of your throat to discover that this has all ended up in court. Mr. Smith's lawyers believe that the land beneath which the ship is submerged is navigable waterway. If they're right, U.S. law says the first person to find abandoned treasure gets first dibs on the spoils.
However, if the court decides it's land, then Mr. O'Connor's family gets first crack at the jewelry, trinkets and, um, those metal contraptions they hung recalcitrant sailors in.
The O'Connor family's lawyer, Ron Walker, was very forthright with ABC News: "It was offensive that somebody could go on Google Earth, look down, and see what they think is under the ground...and come in and say, I want to dig up your property. They have no proof anything is there and no experience."
Yes, but Mr. Smith has watched Nicolas Cage in National Treasure.
Please allow me to add some more characters to this wonderful tale of Google-eyed adventure, avarice, and advocacy.
The state of Texas also has lawyers. And they're pretty darn sure that there's no commercial waterway there. No, as far as they are concerned, if it's in water, it's in Texas's water. So the state has lodged its claim.
And, through all this, the precise location of the supposedly full vessel is being kept under wraps. (So come on, Google Earth obsessives, please find it for me. Perhaps we can stake a claim too.)
Next month, U.S. District Judge David Hittner will rule. In two months' time, Sean Penn will be asked to play Nathan Smith. With Billy Bob Thornton as Ron Walker. And, hey, how about Josh Brolin defending the state of Texas? I thought he played 43 rather well, didn't you?
After the somewhat strange occurrence of Google suggesting that the entire Internet was diseased (and after CNET's Natalie Weinstein revealing that the company initially placed the blame on a nonprofit organization out of Harvard University), I have delved deep to discover whether there might be other instances of Google error--you know, the sort that might not have seen the light of a million laptops.
This was hard work. But not as hard as one might have thought. There are more than one might have imagined. Here are the Top Five:
1. The Bernie Madoff Scandal. Mr. Madoff, the disgraced money man with long gray hair, will apparently claim a mistaken Google search led to his awful scheme. His story is that he googled 'Fonzi' because he wanted to dye his long locks and copy the look of the famous character from Happy Days. Instead, the search engine gave him results for 'Ponzi' and the rest is history.
Google blamed Vera Stanyan, a 90-year-old grandmother from Idaho for this error. She was, according to the company, an obsessed fan of actor Henry Winkler and had googled 'Fonzi' so many times that the servers temporarily gave out.
2. The Mickey Rourke Incident. A similar tale appears to be unraveling in the case of Mickey Rourke's face. In a moment of weakness, the actor who is now reborn in The Wrestler decided he needed a touch-up to his perfect features. So he googled 'plastic surgery'. However, at that very moment, so many people in Hollywood were googling the same terminology that the Hollywood server--situated in the bunker of the Chateau Marmont Hotel--had something of a heart attack and served up 'drastic surgery'.
Google blamed the error on a bachelor party at the Chateau. Apparently, they made so much noise as to simulate an earthquake of 1.3 magnitude. And, in those days, the servers weren't built to withstand even such an infinitesimal wobble. Naturally, the manufacturer of the servers disagreed.
3. The Case of the UN Weapons Inspectors. Apparently the UN Inspectors who were searching for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq never actually made it to Iraq. Using an early version of Google Earth, they actually landed in the Sahara Desert and found nothing more than peculiar four-humped camels.
Google blamed the error on a teenage programmer from Dubai whom the company had hired on a four-week work experience program. His name, according to the company's records, was Freddy Krueger.
4. The Tom Daschle Miscommunication. Perhaps one of the most unfortunate incidents concerns the man nominate to be Health Secretary--Senator Tom Daschle. He seems to have forgotten to pay $140,000 in back taxes on a car and chauffeur he enjoyed for some three years. I am told that he was in possession of a Google Android phone and sent a text message (to his chauffeur, it appears) for the tax bill to be paid.
However, Android was having a bad day and the message appears to have disappeared, as some text messages do, into dead air. Google blamed the problem on three children in Wichita, Kansas, who had hacked into Android HQ in search of alien cartoon characters.
5. The Michael Phelps Fiasco. Then there's the latest, and perhaps most painful error. It involves Olympic swim hero and man with remarkably short legs compared with his torso, Michael Phelps. A photograph was released that appeared to show him partaking of a bong.
Well, I can reveal that Mr. Phelps in fact googled 'Bond', as he believes that he would be a natural, and far taller, replacement for Daniel Craig in the next Bond movie. Unfortunately, the search engine made an unscheduled turn and offered him 'Bong.' With such devastating consequences to his potential future acting career.
The company blamed the error on two fans of the movie Pineapple Express in Kabul, Afghanistan. Apparently, they delight in messing with a large Google server in their country with the aim of turning the whole world into raving potheads.
It is never easy to maintain such a sprawling and complex network as Google's. And we should not be tempted into blaming the company for any of these unfortunate incidents.
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