Here at McAllen-Miller International Airport, Texas, someone has asked Thelma to marry them by writing an enormous proposal along one of the airport’s access roads.

However, I half hope that Thelma declined this particular offer, on the the grounds that if the potential suitor couldn’t be bothered writing the word “you” in full, then they weren’t worth marrying. They also very annoyingly switched to lowercase letters in the middle of a word!

Of course this isn’t the first marriage proposal that’s been found on Google, but it definitely is the most ambitious – the proposals to D by person unknown, Melissa by Uxmal, and of course the one done by the unnamed person who wasn’t even sure who they wanted to marry, are all far smaller.

Of course if anyone were to actually adhere to my newly-invented “guidelines for acceptance of aeroplane-visible marriage proposals”, then only Melissa would have accepted, as Uxmal is the only suitor to have not switched case incorrectly or leave out any letters. Good work Uxmal, but perhaps you should go a little bigger next time.

Thanks to William Collins, philverney and doc0829.

At first glance Hart Island in the Long Island Sound, New York, seems a rather inconspicuous little island. Dig a little deeper… and things get a little more disturbing.

In 1869 Hart Island was established as the City’s public cemetery – NYC’s Potter’s Field, where impoverished, unidentified, unclaimed or unwanted bodies are buried. Over the next 120 years the island was home to virtually every conceivable kind of a socially undesirable person – in a wide variety of facilities including:

• A prison for Confederate soldiers
  
• An isolation zone during a yellow fever epidemic
  
• A women’s tuberculosis hospital
  
• An insane asylum
  
• An old men’s home
  
• A young men’s reformatory
  
• A WWII Navy disciplinary barracks
  
• A narcotic rehabilitation centre

The island was also home to a Nike Ajax missile base, and the missile silos are still visible even from up here.

Today Hart Island is no longer any kind of jail (the last prisoners were transferred to NYC’s infamous Rikers Island in 1991), but the City Cemetery is still maintained by the Department of Corrections – during the week a consignment of inmates is brought here by bus to bury the forgotten dead.

Each year up to 3,000 bodies are buried in Hart Island’s Potter’s Field, which is marked out in squares by white gravestones – with up to 150 adult bodies or 1,000 infants packed into each square.

The DOC estimates that up to 750,000 burials have taken place here since 1869 (although around 100 disinterments take place each year too), but given how tiny the island is, this must surely be America’s most densely packed cemetery. In 1948 the prisoners erected a monument to all the unclaimed dead who are buried on Hart Island, which still stands to this day.

Hart Island isn’t open to the general public, but in 2000 a group of historians were allowed to visit and the resulting ground level photo-tour is well worth seeing.

Links: Hart Island Wikipedia page, the Hart Island official site, and a detailed history of the island.

Thanks to Nat.

One of our readers, Morgan, lives in Chappaqua, New York, and he’d heard that Bill Clinton (the 42nd President of the United States) lives here too. So Morgan took a little wander with Google Maps, and when he found a house with three black secret service cars out the back, he was pretty sure he’d found the right place

Thanks to the resourceful Morgan.

The Statue of Liberty was, as we all know, donated to America by the country of France and stands as a welcome to all returning Americans, visitors, and immigrants. She stands at just 151 feet tall and as everyone says looks really small in real life.

There’s smaller scale copies of Ms. Liberty all over the place including France’s very own copy which stands facing West to her larger sister.

The suburb of Mountain Brook, Alabama has a 1/5 size Statue of Liberty, whose flame is actually lit with Alabama natural gas.

And there’s a copy of everything in Las Vegas, so of course they’ve got a 1/2 size Liberty Statue outside the New York, New York Casino.

More replicas, and a long list of movie appearances on Wikipedia.

The Flatiron Building (actually the Fuller Building) is one of New York’s most distinctive sights, and when they finished constructing it in 1902, it was one of the city’s tallest buildings (although 87 metres seems pretty tiny these days).

At its rounded tip the tower is only 2 metres wide, and the shape apparently creates a wind-tunnel effect – much to the enjoyment of the local men, who originally took great pleasure in hanging around and watching ladies skirts get blown up…

The Flatiron has been in all sorts of movies including Armageddon, Hitch, Shark Tale and both Spider-Man movies (as the Daily Bugle offices!).

Thanks to Frank Castle.