Ooh, I'm really scared

(Not so easy to convey sarcasm in the written form.)

Here are a number of Halloween related Google Maps mashups.



None are tricks, but none are really treats, either.

Bah humbug
(wait... wrong holiday).

James and Joe

James and Joe are a young creative team who deserve a plug.

This is partly because they've used the Google Maps interface in a really fresh way, but more because they are at my hometown (Leeds) university.

Oh, and they also look to be really talented creatives too.

Book relief

Books would be great if they weren't boring.

They're really hard work. You have to use your imagination. It's not like watching a film where they show you the setting so you don't have to think about it for yourself.

Well, fellow literature intolerants, I'm here to help with a couple of creations that might take the hell out of Othello.

Google Lit Trips uses Google Earth to map out and bring to life a whole host of literary journeys.



Littourati does a similar thing with Google Maps (though seems to be pretty Kerouac-obsessed).



I'd like to see them map Jules Verne's 'Journey to the Centre of the Earth'.

Cook-along-a-YouTube

We all like to cheat a bit when we have friends over for dinner. You know, like buying ready made meals from the store, but hiding the packing before your guests arrive. Everyone does it. A new TV show started in the UK on Friday night, and it will expose our laziness. It's called Cookalong with Gordon.



In case you don't know, Gordon Ramsay is a huge celebrity in the UK... he's the world's top paid chef, has loads of posh restaurants, TV shows, books and all manner of other cash-cowery in his name.

The show invites you to video yourself cooking along with Gordon, then uploading it to a special YouTube channel. The best ones are shown on the show the following week.



And there's a Cookalong Google Map too:



Those chefs' hats look a bit sinister to me.

Who lives in a house like this?

Here's a piece of Google-based art from a few years back.



Googlehouse animates images into a house, which consists of rooms that are based on a relevant keyword search in Google Images.

What?

Oh shut up and just look at it here.

It's hard enough to get teenage boys to leave their bedroom as it is, but imagine if it were decorated like the sex room?

Please wash your hands after reading

For most posts on this blog, I tend to reference tools that are more funny than functional. But hey - if something is both, then high fives all round.

There's nothing funny about being absolutely busting for a leak, with no apparent hope of lavatorial relief for miles (well, it's funny if it happens to someone else).

Relief is at hand, if you'll pardon the double pun, because there's a new Google Maps based tool that shows the location (and rating) of hundreds of thousands of public toilets. Particularly gloriously thank-you-so-much-you've-saved-my-life helpful on a mobile phone. I can hear the universal chorus of relieved unzipping and 'aaahhhs' as a I type.

Toilets are naturally funny, so it's great that the creators have stayed on-brand by calling it Sit Or Squat.

Bob The Browser

The 'Human Browser' art project has been going for a few years now, and was recently featured at the Biennale of Sydney, 2008.

It's a series of live performances, with an actor playing the role of a web browser, taking a live feed based on a Google hack.

Here's the artist's description of it:

As the world-system reaches its limitations (depletion of natural resources, expected end of low-cost labour, the end of the ideology of liberalism, the fading of desire, etc.), capitalism uses the irony of history to try to relaunch its paradoxical machinery by pushing back its internal limits: freedom of speech is revealed to be the prerequisite for the scientific colonization of intimacy; global terrorism and reality TV feed a spectacle regulated by the panoptical enslavement mechanism of the blogosphere; "Irational Behaviour" that was for long seen as the limit of any economical theory becomes the new field for the externalisation of advertising costs.  Human Browser, the perpetual dandy, embodies this 'Irational Behaviour''.

I tried to make sense of this at Google Translate, but unfortunately they don't yet have a setting for the language of Art Wank.

For gramaphone grandads

I know it's hard to imagine now, but there was a time when people bought music in things called 'shops'. Music took on a physical form (rather than the melodiously magical string of 1s and 0s we know and love today). The discs that the black and white music came on were wrapped in albums with images on the cover.

The Word magazine has created a Google Maps mashup showing where classic album cover photos were shot.



The cover for the Specials' album Specials was shot in Coventry. The least special place you'll ever go, or be sent to.

Google Gallery

Valery Grancher is a French artist who has painted a series of Google paintings called 'Google Paintings'.  Not very artistic with the naming there, Valery.

The concept is described as:

'the global speed of the internet is challenged with the slowness of painting tradition'.

He could have saved himself months, if only he'd looked down at his keyboard.  Then his concept could have been:

'the slowness of painting tradition is challenged by the existence of the 'print screen' key'.

Bush Votes for The Google

Corbijn Collection

Anton Corbijn has directed loads of music promos over the years, for great artists from Depeche Mode to The Killers to Johnny Cash. He's also worked with Coldplay. Well, we all have to mouths to feed I suppose.

Well, now some bloke called Soren Johannessen (presumably Italian) has created a Google Maps mashup (here) that has most of those videos geotagged. Well worth a play.

I see he's also done a Bryan Adams video called 'Do I Have To Say The Words?' I think you can insert your own joke here.

Higher purpose

I started to write out a description for something, then halfway through thought, 'why am I bothering? Someone else has already done it.' Besides - it was too hard. And there was no comedy in it.

So instead I'll just post the link to it in The Guardian.

And I'll show a picture too, because even I'm not too lazy to do that:

Homepagerotica

Scientists have shown that the internet was invented for porn, as well as to prove that people have too much time on their hands. Not that those two are unrelated.

Anyway, here's an example of the latter, and very very definitely not the former. Unless Google logos get your naughty bits tingling.

If this is what passes for American college humour these days, then I'm rather glad that I'm British and old.

Around The World in 80 Seconds

Jonathan Ahlbrand is an educational consultant with a focus on technology.  He has recreated the first ever solo circumnavigation of the globe (by Joshua Slocum).  Only this couch-loving lazy-arse has done it in Google Earth, rather than a boat.  No wonder we have an obesity crisis.

Not In My Book

Books.  Let's be honest, people only buy them for one reason... to put on shelves at home to impress dates.  Why else would we keep them after we've read them?  For wall insulation? Please.

Anyway, I've just remembered this book from ages ago, and it doesn't even perform that function:

The author Charles Cumming created a story called 21 Steps which unfolds as you go from place to place around the world on an interactive Google Map.

I beg of you, please don't let this be the end of real books for our shelves.  What?  Like I can rely on my looks?

Dubya redub

Forget about laughing at Sarah Palin for the moment, there are still a few pips of comedy to be squeezed out of George W. Bush's lemons. 

Oliver Stone is actively inviting people to make YouTube mash-ups of his new new film 'W.' Even the tools have been provided.  Here's the link.

Let's face it, people were going to do it anyway, so it seems like a smart move for Mr Stone to get in there first.

It's hard to get funnier than the actual George Bush, but this could get close.

The Googling

The Vacationeers are a comedy group, who earlier this year made this:

It got a lot of hits, so since then they have created a whole web series called The Googling, which can be found at their YouTube channel here.

Sunroof

A new service called Roofray uses Google Earth to let you work out how much solar energy your house could capture, via panels on your roof (and so how much you could save on energy bills):

The energy you capture   =   your roof size   x  hours of sunshine in your location.

I don't really need this service, because I live in London, and 

anything   x   zero   =   zero