A small German church has laid a bold claim to the title of “World’s most squinty building“.

Located in the town of Bad Frankenhausen, the bell tower of a 14th century church has been measured at an angle of 4.5 degrees to the vertical. With the backing of the Guinness Book of World Records, the town hopes to steal the limelight from the well know Leaning tower of Pisa and its puny 3.97 degree angle.

The folks in Italy responded to the announcement with barely more than a “meh”.

However, the nearby German town of Suurhusen kicked up fuss with their leaning church tower of 5.07 degrees, claiming this to be the true title holder¹.

Google Earth users might ask what all the fuss is about as, from appearances, the cities of New York and Dallas must hold the title with their precarious leaning skyscrapers.

These towers are, of course, not leaning at all. They are at the points where two differently angled aerial photographs have been stitched together.

Previously on Google Sightseeing we’ve seen The Leaning Tower of Pisa, Leaning Tower of Niles and the intentionally leaning Kio Towers which, at 15 degrees to the vertical, must surely be a world record contender?

Thanks: Sunday Telegraph, Craig Simpson, Simone, Jeff Cutter & Catdoor

While on holiday we missed the news of a new Chinese nuclear submarine being spotted on Google Earth.

Not much is known about the new class of Ballistic Missile Submarine, which is called the Jin-class or Type 094, but the US government estimated last year that China might build 5 of them to act as a permanent sea-based deterrent.

While we’re on the subject of elusive submarines, this brown looking mini-submarine is in fact a real-life Yellow Submarine!

It was built by an enterprising chap from Brooklyn who intended to recover the treasures of the sunken Andrea Doria, which wrecked on its way to New York city in 1956. With investment from the locals he designed and built the mini-sub himself, painting it yellow because it was the cheapest paint to hand.

Unfortunately, during its launch in 1970, the submarine sank (unintentionally) and the locals weren’t prepared to continue to invest in the builder’s madcap idea. The sub was eventually scavenged itself, and its rotting shell remains abandoned in the small ship graveyard of Coney Island Creek.

The full history and pictures from the past and present of the submarine are available on Forgotten NY

Thanks: Thomas Paul

The interest in Google’s new Street View mode has been incredible, and there’s been coverage of it everywhere¹ – meaning that lots of other sites have posted stuff before we did, including:

E.T. spotted in a field – with a laser beam it seems:

A vehicle caught speeding:

A reflection of one of the vans used to capture all of these images:

A guy caught leaving a strip club:

A guy caught going into an adult book store:

A shot of a person who happened to bend over at an unfortunate moment:

The Boing Boing story² of how someone found their cat on Street Views:

…and many others – in fact there’s also been a number of new sites springing up which have begun to collect these Street View locations, including streetviewr.com, LaudonTech, streetviewvoyeur.com, Streetview Notables and there’s a Wired page collecting them too.

Of course here at GSS, we’ll continue to provide you the cream of the crop of Street Views, alongside our regularly scheduled programming!

Thanks to everyone who has submitted one of these sights, and to all the sites who are collecting them.

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

With high-resolution images all over the globe, Google Earth has captured many sporting events actually in-progress, so today we proudly present – The Top 10 different sports you can actually see people playing on Google Earth!

As a bonus, we’ve tried to work out how each game is going, and to make things even more difficult for ourselves, we’ve limited our search to ballgames only.

10. First let’s look at the 2nd of the 18-hole Las Vegas Country Club Golf Course, where we see the pin lying on the grass and the person closest playing their putt. Everyone else is standing around, probably telling him to hurry up.

9. As the world’s most popular sport, there must be hundreds of games of football being played at any one second. Here we see students playing “the beautiful game” at the University of Tokyo. However, this looks like it’s just a practise session as there’s no goalie at either end.

8. There’s people playing tennis all over the globe but for the top 10 we’ve chosen these two games of doubles being played on clay in Germany.

The eastern game is in full swing, and on the western court the players are standing in their service positions, and judging from the shadows it looks as if the southern team are about to serve!

7. There’s a good turnout for Lawn Bowls at Bell Vue Park Bowling Green in Newport, Wales. Sadly the bowls are just too small to be seen so we can’t tell how the games are going.

6. The stands are filling up at Yankee stadium, and there’s a couple of people on the field, but we’re a little too early for the game.

Hmm, we’ll need another baseball game in progress… here’s four!

In the thumbnail we see a batter up at the plate, and I think the bases are loaded.

5. The Shay in Halifax, England is also used for football games, but today it’s a home game for local rugby league team Halifax RLFC.

The ball is probably somewhere in the west of the pitch and the team to the north are on the offensive.

4. They’re playing lacrosse in Salamanca, New York. You can tell that it’s a men’s game as there are 20 players on the pitch (women’s lacrosse would have 24 players).

3. Here is a cricket match being played in the village of Hoylandswaine, north of Sheffield. It looks like they’re between plays, as the batsman has stepped back from the wicket to the west and we can see the other batsman and the bowler at the eastern end.

2. Here we see a packed gameday at Seahawks Stadium (now Qwest field) with 63,588 people watching the Nevada Wolf Pack at Washington State Cougars on August 31, 2002.

Google Earth Community member GEChump managed to identify the exact play seen in the photo, making this 11:37 remaining in the second quarter with the game tied at 7.

The Cougars eventually went on to win 31-7.

1. Finally, we find a tense one-on-one street-Basketball game being played in Rolde, Netherlands. Due to the left-hand player’s poor defence the right-hand player has just taken a shot at the basket, however they’ve missed and the ball is rebounding back.

Have you found a ball game on Google Earth not mentioned here? Let us know!

Thanks: heamit, mike, Kegan, seamus, Jeff, John Culbert, Jeni, Kristen, Mark, shuvman, vancantona, silkobilko, Crebbin, patmonahan, Majoska, pttech, Adam Rus, Ian, Arlene and the Google Earth Community.