About half way between Los Angeles and Las Vegas you might spot an unusual exit sign on Interstate 15, directing you towards the delightfully unpronounceable Zzyzx Road.

If you were to take the exit, you’d find Zzyzx Road to be rather long, and very boring. So boring in fact, that the Street View car gave up having only recorded the first short section.

But the length of Zzyzx Road might well have been a deliberate ploy to keep people stumbling upon what lies at the end…

Up until 1974, travellers that persevered on Zzyzx Road were rewarded with arrival at Zzyzx Springs, a hotel and spa set up here amongst the hot springs in 1944 by crackpot quack and radio evangelist Curtis Howe Springer.

Mr Springer may have named his hotel so as it would always be alphabetically last when the authorities scoured the phone book for wrongdoers – as the whole operation was run completely illegally.

The property was never Mr Springer’s, and he never obtained permission to build here, so it’s surprising that Zzyzx Springs managed to remain squatting here for 30 years before he was eventually kicked off the land.

Today Zzyzx is the site of the Desert Studies Center in the Mojave National Preserve which “provides the opportunity for individuals and groups to conduct research, receive instruction, and experience the desert environment” (Official site).

Thanks to Tim Derby, XF and Alan.

As one of Google Street View cars drove past the Laguna Seca Raceway, it happened to capture a photograph of a race in action.

Aware of its own existence as a fuel-efficient-but-not-exactly-a-racecar Toyota Prius, the anthropomorphized car obviously dreamed of one day being in the Le Mans.

Then all of a sudden, and with some wavy lines down the screen, the dream came true! The Google Street View car was part of the race!

Feeling the wind through its hair as it raced round the track, the car was bolstered by some trackside fans who didn’t spot it as a fraud.

But the dream was on shaky ground, with the car inexplicably being transported back up onto the overbridges as it tried to drive under them.

Eventually though, our plucky camera car took the chequered flag.

Then, awaking from the dream, the street view car went back to the drudgery of capturing pictures of people’s houses.

Warning: This post contains partial nudity and other images that you may not deem suitable for the workplace or for children.

When we first posted our notorious Topless Sunbather here on Google Sightseeing back in September 2006, half the world seemed to be appalled that a person’s privacy should be invaded in such a way and then posted on the Internet, and the other half wanted higher resolution images.

Evaluating the situation again nearly 3 years later, it seems that only half the people got what they wanted.

When Google launched their controversial Street View service in the US, we saw all sort of things that the press were appalled at; including our own post of the Google Street Fight that went on to become one of the best known Street View sightings. Perhaps because of the way US culture operates, we saw violence in the streets – but sexually explicit images never appeared within the US Street View images to any great extent.

On our Google Sightseeing Twitter page we’ve been posting Street View sights for nearly a year now, and we’ve seen the occasional poster or painting showing partially clothed women, but the inevitable Topless Street View Sunbather never materialised… that is until last week’s launch of Street View in the UK and the Netherlands, which also brought updates to several European countries that already had partial coverage.

Google anticipated some of this of course; they chose to skirt around the edges of Amsterdam’s Red Light District rather than have to remove all of the images later. Of course they couldn’t avoid them all, and they did inadvertently capture several images of prostitutes sitting in their windows. In Groningen one woman was even seen showing off an extensive range of sex toys. Although these images have all now been removed, none of them showed any nudity to speak of.

In contrast to the Dutch prostitution system, in Italy the prostitutes can often be seen on Google Street View sitting in their folding chairs while awaiting some passing trade. What doesn’t seem to be so common however, is for them to be sitting with their breasts entirely exposed.

So there we have it. Unlike with pixellated aerial photos, there’s no doubting what we can see here – this image clearly shows a woman’s naked breasts on Google’s Street View service, and at time of writing it remains visible within the Google Maps imagery¹. In fact there are a number of women with their breasts exposed in the Italian images.

Here in Europe it’s perfectly acceptable for a woman to wear nothing but a thong when she visits the beach, so it’s hardly surprising that the Street View car captured the following images when driving through Lazio (again, these images are both still available on Google at time of writing).

Google Street View has been getting a lot of grief from the UK’s papers in the last few days, most of which has been blatant scaremongering. There’s really nothing wrong with there being a picture of your house on the internet – it presents no increased risk to your security or privacy. Just like Google’s satellite images, the community-positive local and global benefits² of Street View will outweigh the unfounded, hypothetical fears concocted by newspapers with column inches to fill.

Seeing inappropriate images is another matter. In truth nobody expects to find breasts on their mapping service, despite the differing attitudes of people of different nationalities. While there are a small number of images that inadvertently appeared on Street View which should be removed³ – if it turns out that these woman don’t have a problem with letting the world see their breasts, then should Google remove their image at the request of somebody else?

On a related note, I wonder if this image of a semi-naked Glaswegian enjoying the summer sun will be removed?

March 17th is St. Patrick’s Day, which was originally the annual feast of the best known of Ireland’s patron saints¹, and today a worldwide celebration devoted to all things Irish.

Over here in Ireland and the UK, we have been known to celebrate with vast quantities of Guinness. Over in the US however, they like large scale annual celebrations involving crazy things like temporarily dying the Chicago River green (which sadly hasn’t yet been captured on Google Earth²).

But in today’s post we’ll be looking at some of the places that St. Patrick has found a permanent home in the USA.

This is St Patrick’s park in Indiana, where they have created a 400 metre long homage to their namesake, entirely in the medium of trees. Which is apt, given how much of the colour green gets bandied around on the 17th of March.

We’ve visited the original Dublin already on Google Sightseeing, but there are at least nine cities called Dublin in the USA alone!

See for yourself: Dublin, California; Dublin, Georgia; Dublin, Indiana; Dublin, New Hampshire; Dublin, North Carolina; Dublin, Ohio; Dublin, Pennsylvania; Dublin, Texas; and Dublin, Virginia.

In New York City we find St. Patrick’s Cathedral, a spectacular Neo-Gothic cathedral in midtown Manhattan that has become ingrained in Hollywood movie history, after being featured in several movies including 2002’s Spider-Man.

So, where else has St. Patrick and the influence of Ireland made a lasting impression around the world?

Happy Paddy’s day!

Thanks to Chris R.

California’s San Joaquin Valley is one of the most productive agricultural regions in the US, and in recent years has seen an expansion of the importance of dairy farming.

The US is the second largest dairy producer in the world, and California is responsible for more dairy produce than any other US state. Much of this output comes directly from the San Joaquin Valley – where today we’re visiting some of the largest dairy farms on Earth.

There are dozens of dairy farms in the valley, but we’re just going to look at one of the largest, where there could be as many as 20,000 cows on one single property.

Here we can see the loafing barns where the cows can take shelter. The largest of these might house up to 2,000 cattle each, and when seen from Street View the scale of the operation starts to become clear.

Further south we find the milking parlours, where on Street View I think we can see the cows being milked.

As you might imagine, feeding this number of animals is no small task, and the feed storage barns are absolutely gigantic. However the question I bet you’re all wondering is “what happens to all the feed when it comes out the other end?”

The large brown pool on the west side of the property is the manure lagoon. Yes, a lagoon of cow poo. A regular dairy might require an acre of cropland to disperse the manure of just 5 cows, so you can imagine how much crop space you need for a herd of 20,000.¹

Of course none of this is without cost to the environment. It’s estimated that cattle farming is responsible for 18% of greenhouse gases, making it one of the most pressing environmental problems in the world.

Read more about Dairy Farming and the San Joaquin Valley at Wikipedia.

Thanks to ed, Dru Pollini, and Ronald.