It seems the Street View camera car has a habit of coming across expensive car accidents, and today we see that a white Mercedes E-Class has, rather inexplicably, managed to drive into a tree on a quiet, straight road in Minneapolis.

Judging by the bumper damage, I’m reckoning it wasn’t just a handbrake left off or a mistake whilst parking. Thankfully, the driver appears to be unhurt, and looks like she is being assisted by a friendly neighbour!

Thanks: Jalopnik.com

Yesterday at 6:05pm local time, the I-35W bridge in Minneapolis failed catastrophically. Sadly this tragedy occurred during the evening rush hour - and at time of writing at least 6 people have died, around 60 were injured, and there are a further 20 people still missing.

The BBC have a photo gallery containing some terrifying images of the devastation, and there’s also an aerial shot which clearly shows the extent of the damage.

More information can be found as it happens at Google News, and for the history of the bridge, see Wikipedia.

Our thoughts are with those affected.

Inspired by the National Geographic Photo of the Day last week, I went looking for Minneapolis’s Spoonbridge and Cherry sculpture. Unfortunately something got lost in translation.

The story wasn’t much better on Windows Live Local, or Yahoo! Maps Beta who both use exactly the same image (the traffic on the roads is identical), but interesting to see how differently the other services handle compression of the images. Google actually looks pretty poor in comparison to both of the others.

Anyway, I was disappointed not to be able to see it better, so here’s the giant spoon and fruit courtesy of National Geographic.

Thanks to National Geographic and Norton Lam.

Sever’s Corn Maze in Shakopee (outside of Minneapolis) is an annual maze which is apparently the largest in the united states. The Google Maps photo was taken sometime in 2002-2003 when the maze depicted an upside-down map of the world, perhaps because opposite magnetic poles attract? (Maze homepage.)

Thanks: byteCoder, Rich Holmes, Brandon & Dan

This is the Cirque du Soleil in Montreal. Well, it’s one of them anyway.. the ‘Circus of the Sun’ is an entertainment company founded in 1984 by former fire-eater Guy Laliberté, and actually consists of at least 11 different troups of performers (Wikipedia page).

Cirque du Soleil isn’t a circus in the traditional sense (because they don’t use any animals), but they do all sorts of stuff involving contortionists, jugglers, feats of strength, clowning, and trapeze artists. You can see one of their travelling set-ups in what is usually an empty car park in Minneapolis. Just north of here is Saint Anthony Falls, which also looks pretty cool from up here.

I saw one of their performances once in the Albert Hall, and I thoroughly recommened checking them out if you get the chance, it’s incredible stuff. As it happens, they’ll be performing permanently at the Tokyo Disney Resort beginning in 2008 if you’re planning a trip!

Thanks to Lowrent, Jean-Sébastien, Dauns, Robert Craig, Eric Veilleux and Andy.

If I was going to go to all the effort of writing something in a field I’d make sure it was something more interesting than the name of my country; everyone who’s here knows they’re here so what’s the point? Given the space I’d probably write “googlesightseeing.com”

Anyway, over in Rochester, NY is the letters “USA” mowed into a field.

And in Rosemount, MN a “USA” with flag is mowed with very straight lines.

Thanks: John & Amy.

Although not very interesting to look at from space, the Mall of America is the USA’s largest mall. If you switch to map mode you can see that it’s so big inside the building they’ve named the streets.

And if that’s still too boring you can scroll north to Minneapolis / St. Paul Airport where a whole manner of planes are parked, landing and taking off.

Thanks: Brandon, PikaPikaChick & a million others.