Hello? Can you hear me?

Well, four days later, and I can finally access the site for long enough to write an update post. Since the Major Digging on our Topless Sunbather story, things have been pretty crazy.

I posted the story on Tuesday, and on Wednesday the site became unresponsive due to the sheer number of visitors. The Digg Story which brought us down is even now still climbing the most popular this week page, and at time of writing has 2420 diggs. To make matters worse, on Thursday the Register posted their own version of the story (note that their version is factually incorrect – Dutch TV had already tried to go and see the sunbather before we ever posted about it) which further contributed to our downtime.

On Friday, just as we thought things were getting back to normal, Ekstra Bladet (a Danish tabloid newspaper) also linked to the story, which brought us down all over again!

It’s now Sunday, and the traffic really is dying down now, so fingers crossed, things really will get back to normal tomorrow (unless some other site picks up the story of course )

Thanks for bearing in there!

P.S. Google Sightseeing is very proud to now be described on our Wikipedia page as having notoriously posted a picture of a topless woman

In 1947 a guy named Art Lacey decided he wanted to buy a surplus B-17G “Flying Fortress” WWII bomber, and with little prior experience, fly the plane from Kansas back to Milwaukie, Oregon.

After an incredible (and highly improbable) sounding journey, Mr Lacey used his new purchase… as a forecourt roof for his gas station.

Today the gas station has made way for the family-run Bomber Drive-In restaurant which still operates here, and these days the bomber is one of only a handful of this type of aircraft left intact in the world.

Thanks to Nathaniel.

Hi! We’re still here but we got seriously digged! Please bear with us and normal service will resume as soon as possible.

Update: Looks like the worst of the storm is over now – Digg is pretty big these days huh? We’ll be back with your regularly scheduled programming tomorrow

P.S. The Topless Sunbather story is currently on the first page of the most popular stories on Digg this week!

Update 2: Sorry about this people, we’re back (again) but still under incredibly heavy load from the Digg post. We’re currently at 2119 Diggs and climbing all the time, and Oh. My. Goodness. The Alexa Stats are unbelievable.

Update 3: Server is doing fine just now, probably because the traffic from The Register has died down! As if you couldn’t have guessed, their take on the story is currently their most popular story of the last 24 hours.

Hopefully we really are on the road to recovery now, thanks for bearing with us

Imagine having a quiet afternoon’s topless sunbathing on your private, secluded, back patio – and then one day discovering that your nearly naked body has been posted all over the Internet!

Whilst this isn’t the first time someone has been caught with their kit off in Google Earth, to my eye, it seems that what little clothes are actually being worn, are… ahem – the kind most commonly worn by the fairer sex, shall we say?

Thanks to Romanov.

Holy Cardigans, Batman! There’s an absolutely enormous bug in Germany, which is clearly hell-bent on destruction! Run for the hills!

At over 50 metres, this bug would be far bigger than the previously posted World’s Largest Bug (and a whole heap more terrfying to boot) – fortunately, a moderator at the Keyhole forums informs us that this bug has gone to meet his maker, and anyway, is only actually 1mm long! He reckons it’s a Thrips which was probably squished between a glass plate and the film during the scanning process.

However the circle of brown at the insect’s posterior is probably the only example we’ll ever see of insect excrement captured in a satellite photo! Nice.

Thanks to SammyOfKassel, koichiwb, Hill and superlocal.

Edit: Added an ’s’ to ‘Thrips’. Thanks Parabellum.