The White House is, as we all know, the official residence of the President of the United States. But did you also know that the White House is the official residence of an Iranian immigrant?

Of course, I’m not talking about the original White House, in today’s world a man born in Iran would probably get shot for going near the White House, let alone pitching a tent. I’m instead talking about Fred Milani’s home in Atlanta.

Mr Milani, an Iran-born American citizen, built his mini White House in 2001. It boats 36 rooms and in terms of area is about 30% that of the original White House, although the layout is completely different.

Only six of the 36 rooms are bedrooms while the other rooms in the house include the “Monkey Room”, decorated with monkeys and leopard print, the “Queen Room”, with lots of pink pillows, and the “Oval office”. Oval here is used loosely as the room isn’t oval-shaped, but it does feature a replica of Abraham Lincoln’s old desk.

Other replica White House homes around the US include this one in Fairfax County, Virginia.

A smaller replica in San Antonio, Texas.

And lastly in Dallas, Texas there’s a “Red House” – A White House replica purportedly made out of red bricks.

You might say these replicas are all a bit tacky, but even the President’s White House is a rip-off. The original designs were based on Leinister House in Dublin, Ireland.

Thanks IBreakCellPhones, craigclarke and Bird’s Eye Tourist

The super-high-resolution aerial images of Sydney from the recent Australia Day flyover have this morning been added to Google Maps.¹

Google even did some sightseeing of their own in the email announcement when they included links to Queenscliff Bay, Shark Bay, Bondi Beach, Manly Beach, Luna Park, a Navy Ship, a Tall Ship, Fort Denison, Circular Quay and a totally awesome Helicopter in flight!

However we refuse to be outdone! So here’s some of the best sights we found ourselves, such as a kid on a swing, with a cool shadow…

…the words SEX + DEATH formed in grass beside a weird glass pyramid…

And people playing table tennis. On a floating table tennis table!²

The Australia Day event is different to the rest of Google’s aerial photography, as they actually pre-announced when the plane would by flying over, and even provided a tracker so that you could tell exactly when it would be overhead.

As reported by the Sydney Morning Herald, lots of people naturally took the opportunity to do some serious advertising. One local company spent 10,000 AUD on a huge vinyl sign, whilst many others were attempting to promote everything from websites to dating services, and one person in particular even tried to do some promotion for their own political campaign…

It wasn’t all rampant capitalism though – one man staged an effort to send a message to his estranged wife, in an attempt to secure a reconciliation via the medium of Google Maps…

However, it would seem that all this effort was in vain, as it was later reported that the plane had taken a different flight path than originally described, and didn’t actually arrive at each spot at the planned time, and also didn’t cover nearly so much ground.

According to the SMH article:

At Bondi Beach, Erland Howden and a team from the Nature Conservation Council of NSW rallied over 50 troops together to create a human sign that read “Vote Climate”.

So, we scoured the images of Bondi Beach for any signs of a message. We found lots of new entries for our list of the Top 10 Naked People (and we may yet get to have a Top 100 Half-Naked Hot Chicks post!³), but by the time the plane actually arrived all the climate change campaigners had given up and gone home, as apparently they were suffering from sunburn (I’m sure they were well aware of the irony).

Here the story gets suspicious however. Again, from the SMH article:

Michael Fox and his wife Jodie Fox also had a run in with bureaucracy in the Moore Park, near Fox Studios. Using coloured pieces of A4 paper held down with bamboo satay sticks, the couple and a friend had formed the image of a giant eye.

So we located Moore Park on Google Maps, and yet strangely (despite the fact that this is newer imagery than is currently available on Google Earth), there is no giant eye here! In fact, it would appear that despite being newly updated, this image wasn’t taken on Australia day at all…

So, after hours of combing through the new images, we’ve found no real examples of private advertising or even any sign that the people of Sydney knew they’d be on Google Maps!

Well, except this of course…

…but given that australia.com is the official website of the whole country, it can’t possibly count as spam, right? If so, does that mean no spam made it through at all? All those folk who spent money on giant banners might be upset, but the Slashdotters would be pleased – they were up in arms about the potential “spamming” of Google Maps.

Some conspiracy theorists may say that the delayed flyover was a last-minute change of heart by Google, who perhaps didn’t want their maps application full of free adverts. And whilst it’s certainly possible that over the last 4 weeks Google have been going through all the images and replacing any remaining sections containing spam, they did actually promote this event as “get yourself on Google Maps”, so they must surely have anticipated what people would do, right?

Well, unfortunately the world’s largest real paper planes aren’t usually kept outside, so today we’ll have to make do with sculptures of extremely large paper planes.

in Mukilteo, Washington, Dillion Works (who specialise in creating large 3D architectural elements), claim to have the world’s largest paper plane doubling as an awning over their front door (ground level shot).

Meanwhile in Germany, we find an equally huge, but slightly more adventurous paper plane, which has come to rest on the roof of Berlin’s Tegel airport.

So, does anybody know of any more huge paper planes lying around?

Thanks to me and Frank.

Written on a old pier, just off Manhattan island, are these two pieces of, um, “word art”.

The left hand piece seems to say “SUCK D**K” while the other item looks like the rather confusing “F**K ME SAFE”. What on earth does that mean?

Thanks: Felippo

Built to commemorate the highest temperature ever recorded in the United States, the World’s Largest Thermometer in near Death Valley, California is a whopping 134 feet tall. Why? There’s one foot for every degree – yes, it really did reach an unbelievable 134° Fahrenheit here in 1913.

That’s 40.8 metres and 56.7 °C for those of you feeling confused right now

And although there’s no high-res imagery, the coldest temperature ever recorded in the US , a terrifying −80.0 °F (−62.2 °C), was recorded in Prospect Creek, Alaska.

Thanks to Courtney.

More at Roadside America.