Long-time GSS readers may recall the story of Bennie the Dinosaur, who we originally spotted way back in February 2006.

Bennie was originally employed as the mascot for a now-defunct chain of cigarette shops and in his lifetime had moved around a bit, even changing sex along the way.

The last we’d heard of Bennie was that he’d been moved to the garden of a former employee of the company, but that garden was not covered on Google Earth.

That garden is now visible, but in that time there’s been some shocking developments, and all that we can see are Bennie’s charred remains:

The official word is that Bennie died during a forest fire, but with the dinosaur’s well-publicised past involvement in cigarette advertising it’s hard to accept that story.

A much more likely explanation is that, as with a staggering 800 people in the US each year, Bennie died as a result of carelessness with his cigarettes.

Thanks to Glenn Rice.

This is the huge Potala Palace in Lhasa, Tibet, which used to be the winter residence of the Dalai Lama (the spiritual and political leader of the Tibetan people), until the current 14th Dalai Lama fled in 1959 following a Chinese invasion and the failed uprising that followed. The building contains the sacred gold stupas of the previous eight Dalai Lamas.

The 117 metre-tall palace is built at an altitude of 3,700 m, and measures 400 metres by 350 metres across. The thirteen storeys of building contain over 1,000 rooms, 10,000 shrines and about 200,000 statues. At the south base of the rock is a large space enclosed by walls and gates, where a series of shallow staircases leads to the summit of the rock.

Since the Chinese Government formalised their occupation in 1959, most of historical Tibet has been known as the Tibet Autonomous Region of the People’s Republic of China. To this day, human rights organisations around the world continue to accuse the Chinese government of persecuting and oppressing the local population, while the Chinese government maintains that Tibet has “ample autonomy”.

Today the Potala Palace has been converted into a museum, and the Dalai Lama resides in India, from where he is head of the Tibetan Government in Exile.

The Potala Palace Wikipedia page has more historical information, and there’s a wide range of excellent photographs available at Flickr. For more information on the occupation of Tibet, visit the Free Tibet website.

Thanks to Faine Greenwood, Krystal and Steve.

On this day, August 6, in 1945 – the first nuclear weapon to be used in war was dropped on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. The bomb, Little Boy, was released at 8:15 local time by the American B-29 bomber Enola Gay, and the resulting explosion completely destroyed around 69% of the city’s buildings, directly killing an estimated 80,000 people.

By the end of the year as many as 140,000 of Hiroshima’s people were dead, the overwhelming majority of them civilians. Since then thousands more have died from injuries or illness attributed to exposure to radiation released by the bomb.

The bomb was aimed at this t-shaped bridge, and on the river bank here is the closest structure to ground zero which survived. Today it is known as the Atomic Bomb Dome, remaining exactly as it did in the aftermath of the bomb, and serving as a stark reminder of the devastation nuclear weapons can cause.

The Atomic Bomb Dome is part of the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park which is mainly situated on the island to the south. There are a variety of monuments and buildings in the park, each dedicated to a different aspect of the bombing, all of which are laid out along the course the Enola Gay took, exactly 63 years ago today.

Three days after the destruction of Hiroshima, the US dropped a second bomb on the city of Nagasaki, where a further 80,000 people would be dead by the end of the year.

Educate yourself further about these tragedies by exploring the Wikipedia pages on the subject, beginning with the Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Thanks to Alexey Panasenko, Matt Van Pelt, nineo, Mikhail, Jack, eRez and Matthew McMillan.

This is supposedly the Hokkaidō Centennial Memorial Tower in Nopporo Forest Park, Hokkaidō, Japan. The official site claims it’s 100m tall, and was completed in 1970 to honour the 100th anniversary of Hokkaidō’s official colonisation¹.

Of course dear geeky-reader, you will have already realised that this is simply an elaborate ruse.

Unmistakably, this is in fact Orthanc, the black tower of Isengard, atop which Gandalf was trapped by the wizard Saruman during The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring.

On the left, the Hokkaidō tower, and on the right, Orthanc.

The proof is incontrovertible, as I found both of these images on the Internet.

Thanks to photojennic.

This is the Homomomomonument, er… we mean the Homomonument, in Amsterdam.

Unveiled in 1987, the humorously-named monument serves as a very serious memorial to the many thousands of gay men and women who were murdered during the Second World War.

Homomonument consists of three pink granite triangles, which each form the point of one much larger triangle.

The eastern triangle steps down into the canal, pointing to the National War Memorial at Dam Square. The northern triangle points to the Anne Frank House, and finally the south-western triangle points to the offices of the Center for Culture and Leisure – the world’s oldest continuously operating lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender/transsexual organisation.

More information about the Homomonument is available on the monument’s offical website, as well as on Wikipedia.

Thanks to romulusnr.