iMatt :: The Blog of Matt Clare

I took advantage of the nice weather this past Sunday and raked my lawn of the trash and leaves that had piled up over the winter. My house in St. Catharines is on a corner, by a school, with a hedge; so you couldn’t design a better neighborhood trash collector without some type of laser or fans. So I decided that since all the snow was finally gone it was time to clean things up.

For starters, I got home to find a baby carriage wedged into the hedge. Perhaps there was a stroller on stroller collision at that corner and one was thrown out of the intersection. So I moved the baby carriage to the other side of the house by our trash, it has since moved down the street.

As I started to rake up all the leaves and trash: flyers, cigarettes, food packages, etc. I came across the item above: a pice of a syringe!

What is the only possible conclusion from these two pieces of evidence? My neighborhood has crack babies in it. Clearly babies are cruising down to the corner in their rides, getting jacked up and crawling back to their cribs – probably to hit the bottle. It’s a sad conclusion, but the only plausible one.

If you remember my post from a few months ago I described the multi-million dollar industry that is (was) waiting for the Pope’s death. All the major networks pay millions for access to roofs that overlook the Vatican and can see the Sistine Chapel in order to film the white smoke that will indicate the election of a new Pope.

Digital Globe has taken a picture of the Vatican and the huge line to view Pope John Paul II’s body. From this image you can see the white canvas or tarpaulins that mark CNN’s vantage point. That is to say, based on Anderson Cooper’s shot on and this image, I think it’s CNN’s location. Many broadcasters, including Peter Mansbridge and the CBC, are on rooftops on the south side of Via d. Conciliazione, the street that leads up to St. Peter’s Square.

Below is a small section of DigitalGlobe’s image that show’s CNN’s location/studio. The other picture should help you locate that location in relation to the Vatican and the rest of Rome. I think I even walked by it, from what I can trace from my visit two summers ago – not that it looked as it does now.

GlobalSecurity.org has a good collection of Vatican images where you can see that the CNN set is a recent construction.

click for much larger image

I have finally finished my week long tweaking of this site. For the record, IE 5 and 6 are sooo bad at rendering web pages based on standards!

There were a few bugs in the CSS, which prevented the site from rendering properly on Safari, but I’ve found and corrected those. From here on it the site should ‘look normal’ – but you never know with Internet Exploder. Microsoft should stick to OSs, Office and their other applications – web browsers are not where their talents lie as Microsoft has no appreciation of open standards.

I challanged the slashdoters to find Area 51 via Google Maps – someone (ShadowFlyP) found it! Check it out.

This is certainly not the best image of Area 51, but it’s cool that you can get a map to it from your house. You might want to try to input Mars as your starting location.

If you’ve never seen Area 51 before you should check out GlobalSecurity.org.

UPDATE: 04/13/05 Adam’s got a good collection of Goggle Maps finds over on the brain.

I bought this poster with all the Ferrari world champion drivers at the Toronto Auto Show, but just last weekend I got it framed. Ultimately this poster might end up decorating the walls of my garage, and I’ll be fine with that.