A Bird's Eye View

That Sound You Hear? » Intentional Heartache by Dwight Yoakam
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Now, today's story...

I came across a new (possibly new, I'd never seen it before) feature of Google just the other day. Maps. Yes, maps. But not just maps. Maps with satellite imagery.

There's something about seeing the planet from the vantage point of, well, space. Everything just seems so insignificant. And it becomes increasingly more obvious that we really are all living on the same rock.

Really though, pardon my fascination, but I can't help myself. Looking at my house and surrounding town from an angle perpendicular to that which I've become accustomed to. It's weird. And dare I say it's kind of cool

First, there's my state — should be fairly obvious. Zoom in a little to my city. If the peninsula within a peninsula didn't give it away, that's Tampa. And zoom in as close as possible and you can see my house. Who knew we had a gray roof?

Oh, and there's tons more pictures where that came from. For instance, I've been stuck on wanting to go back to Iceland for some time now. Well, Google's maps don't exactly spell out every inch of the Icelandic countryside. You'd even be hard-pressed to find the names of a given city within the Scandinavian nation.

I was able to figure all of that out as a result of my own personal ingenuity. For example, right here is the airport in Keflavik. To the east is the city itself. My guess is we came in on the south runway considering I remember seeing a lot of vegetation-free volcanic rock below before we actually hit the ground. A lot more than there is before the west runway.

Over here is an overhead image of the glacier that we visited just over four years ago today. Its name is Myrdalsjökull. If you can correctly pronounce that, give yourself ten points. It's not one of the bigger ones, but it was still just as amazing.

Unfortunately I was a little disappointed by Google when trying to locate specific points within the Icelandic capital of Reykjavik. The problem is it's just bad imagery. See for yourself. And for the record, this is the entire island in all of its glory.

But don't think I'm done. Some of the more interesting sights I found were these: The Gateway Arch in St. Louis; The Hollywood sign in California; The Statue of Liberty in New York; A London trifecta of Westminster Abbey, the House of Parliament and Big Ben; The Washington Monument; and Mandalay Bay Resort & Casino in Las Vegas.

It's just such an unusual way to look at things. I'm sure you recognized every one of those places even though you've never actually viewed them from that perspective.

If I find anything else of interest, I'll be sure to let you know. In the mean time, head on over to Google Maps if you're so inclined.

Until next time.

One Crazy Week: Catch up on this week's trades and signings in my hockey blog. Plenty of great players are switching teams this summer. Among them are Paul Kariya, Peter Forsberg, Adam Foote, Brian Leetch, Alexei Zhamnov, Ziggy Palffy, Scott Niedermayer and Nikolai Khabibulin (much to my dismay).