I wish that Google Maps had a feature that would allow you to also see the history of a location, if not in time-lapse images, then at least in text, or a link to any relevant info. There are so many places that leave me wondering. I have lived in the East Village for more than 10 years now and there is an area of vacant lots that always brings me curiosity. These properties must be hung up in litigation, but it's as if a time capsule to the graffiti era of the mid 80's exploded there, sort of. As I was taking the picture above and below somebody asked me what the deal was with that property. There clearly was a structure there at one point but all that is left is evenly distributed rubble. There are quite a few buildings like that in the neighborhood, valuable properties suspended in legal limbo. Law makes all things possible, no?
Among my other Google wishes.... I wish that it was able to save your browsing history so that you could re-visit any of your previous searches. All that it would take would be to have a cache file designated to the searches made when you were logged in to either your Gmail or any other Google account. Though I suppose at some point safety and privacy concerns become paramount. For the traveler though it would be quite a clever addition, especially considering the societal trend towards extreme subjectivity as evidenced by Facebook, Twitter, and the like.
Why is most graffiti so terrible? It's tyrannical in its unrelenting assertion of the blandness and unoriginality of the individual. Like most current "hip-hop", it's always in the time signature of: I/u
Most of it simply fails in the meager goal it sets for itself.
