Google Earth is perhaps the most wonderful thing I run on my computer. Just two or three years ago, the way I can sit here and swoop down and look at nearly anything in the world from above — from the house I grew up in to Warren Beatty’s house on Mulholland Drive — would have seemed like a sci-fi fantasy. And the best part is it’s free, and not too different from the industrial-strength version Wolf Blitzer uses on CNN’s melodramatic Situation Room. It’s one of the few programs I run on this G4 PowerBook that causes it to react physically — it gets very hot, the fan comes on and I’m certain I’ve seen a few drops of sweat roll off it — so you know some powerful things are happening inside to make all this possible.
The pictures of Toronto are a few years old, so until they update them, you can take a psychogeographic time-machine back a little bit and see how quickly the city has changed. My favorite view is of Pearson, where the magnificent Aeroquay One is about half gone as the new terminal’s piers rise up around it. It also shows just how big the new place is when compared to a building I used to think of as huge. The new terminal seemingly swallowed the poor Aeroquay up in its jaws.
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The Situation Room may be dramatic, but it’s hardly mellow.
They finally updated York University! The old pictures were from 2002 and missing four or five buildings. Shows how much work has been going on at the school.