Eponymously Yours, W. Skeffington Higgins

Remember my April 12th entry?

I discovered that a Google Street View mapping car was visiting my neighborhood, and laid in ambush with my camera.



At long last, I find, the data gathered that day have been added to Google Maps. Go to 2625 Wydown Lane in Aurora, Illinois, USA and zoom into Street View, or drag the little orange cartoon person onto the map just south of the intersection of Wydown with White Barn and start looking around. (I'll try embedding a map here, but I'm not sure this works correctly.)

Click here to see map


Eventually you will see a man standing next to a red Pontiac Vibe. He is aiming a camera.


Elsewhere in the neighborhood, there seem to be a lot of little red cars.


I am too busy taking my own pictures to notice that my roof-rack has been disrupted by an image-mosaic boundary.

One can see traces of my car at the following addresses:

2400 White Barn
2403 White Barn
2405 White Barn
2417 White Barn
2457 Wydown
2465 Wydown
2471 Wydown
2479 Wydown
2487 Wydown
2501 Wydown
2503 Wydown
2625 Wydown
2647 Wydown
2615 Newton
2617 Newton
2623 Newton

All images of me, and of red cars, are copyright 2012 by Google.



There's a tree with reddish leaves that appears in both of these pictures.


It's been pointed out that, since I have a camera in front of my face, Google's "recognize a face and blur it" software may have left me alone. Not that I mind, being vain and all.

I am pleased to say that, after many years living in Aurora, I have now achieved landmark status. At least until the next time Google updates their imagery.

I walked out of my house this morning and observed an unfamiliar vehicle on Newton Court.



I waved. The driver waved back.

It was the vividly decorated Google Street View car!
( Pictures within... )
And this wasn't even the most exciting thing that happened today.

EDITED TO ADD: Now read the rest of the story. Images of me surfaced on Street View at the end of 2012.

An announcement appearing on the United States Geological Survey Astrogeology site brings news from the International Astronomical Union's Working Group for Planetary System Nomenclature.

Six New Names Approved for Features on Mars
The following names have been approved for features on Mars: Avarua, Dowa, Fitzroy, Greg, Pál, and Waikato Vallis. For more information, see the Gazetteer of Planetary Nomenclature and the map of quadrangle MC-28 [a PDF].

Small craters on Mars are customarily named for towns of less than 100,000 population; large craters are named for deceased scientists participating in the study of Mars or others, such as writers, who have contibuted to Martian lore.
The features in this group are all in the southern hemisphere of Mars, east of the Hellas Planitia basin. Two of these features are named for creators of science fiction.

Producer George Pál on the lunar-surface set of his film Destination Moon, seen in a kinescope of a KTLA TV interview in December 1949.
Pál, a crater of 79 kilometer diameter, is named for George Pál (1908-1980). In a long career as an animator and film producer, he created the Puppetoons stop-motion shorts and a long list of fantasy and science fiction feature films, such as Destination Moon, When Worlds Collide, and The Time Machine. Pál's Mars connection: bringing H. G. Wells's story War of the Worlds to the silver screen in 1953.

(I hadn't previously realized there was accent in Pál's Hungarian name. I'll follow the USGS's orthography, at least for today.)

Percy Greg's small, bearded "Martials" leading unicorn, from his 1880 novel Across the Zodiac.
Painting by Boris Artzybasheff, copyright 1956 by Time, Inc.
The 68-kilometer crater Greg is named for Percy Greg (1836-1889), English author of Across the Zodiac, an 1880 novel about a trip to Mars. The protagonist builds an antigravity vehicle powered by "apergy," flies to Mars, and becomes embroiled in a conflict within the planet's utopian civilization. Brian Aldiss has speculated that this novel may be the first to feature a journey to another planet in a spaceship. An obituary for Greg may be found here.

The remaining features are crater Dowa, named for a town in Malawi; crater Fitzroy, named for a town in the Falkland Islands; crater Avarua, named for a town in the Cook Islands; and the valley Waikato Vallis, named for a river in New Zealand.

(By the way, this announcement sees The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction added for the first time to the list of references cited in planetary nomenclature. Congratulations to the TEoSF team.)

Remember this?

The ever-alert whl, who knows the area like the back of his hand, points out that I have planned our rendezvous, not for one of Panera Bread Co.'s many delightful cafes, but for their Giant Bakery Warehouse.

Oops.

While whl himself-- who also knows how to use Panera's Web storefinder, an improvement over punching the company name into Google Maps-- might enjoy meeting in the parking lot of the warehouse, and would no doubt be curious to see if free Wifi is available there, he is in Mississippi, and unlikely to attend the lunch.

Therefore I propose we meet instead, at 11:45 or some later time, at:

Panera Bread
39-41 South Northwest Hwy.
Park Ridge, IL 60068

This appears to be where Northwest Highway crosses Touhy.