Really, do it. It’s amazing, even if it has no street views yet.

NASA and Arizona State University have joined forces to compile unbelievable images of Mars.  It includes beautifully colored elevation maps as well as visible and infrared views. Google Earth 5.0 now features Earth, Sky and Mars options with 3D terrain views. Not to mention Google Ocean with complete with trips below the surface. Wow!

“What if We Could All Be Friends?” by Jordan Perry

If you use Google as your homepage like I do, then you get to enjoy the different “special occasion” Google logos. Each year for the past 4 years, Google has had a competition for school age kids to design a Google logo around a theme. This year, the theme is “What if…?”

“What if Fish Could Think?” by Michael Mendenhall (grades 4-6)

Over 16,000 kids entered a logo, and now the public can vote on the 40 finalists, evenly divided by age group. The national winner will be displayed on the Google homepage on May 22. In addition to the prestige of having their artwork chosen to be nationally displayed, the National Winner will win a $10,000 college scholarship to be used at the school of their choice, a trip to the Googleplex, a laptop computer, and a t-shirt printed with their doodle.  Google will also award the winner’s school a $25,000 grant towards the establishment/improvement of a computer lab. The other 3 National Finalists will win a trip to the Googleplex, a laptop computer, and a t-shirt printed with their doodle.

“What if the Google Logo had a Gothic Twist?” by Paul Massicott (grades 10-12)

Go to the Doodle 4 section of Google to see all 40 finalists and vote for your favorites.

Google Maps Street View has added Raleigh to the elite list of cities you can see from an eyeline perspective instead of the rooftop satellite view. Our entire office came to a grinding halt in productivity yesterday when we realized we could navigate the streets without getting out of our chairs. “Hey, go to my house!” Hey, my neighbors dogs are outside!” “Is Designbox on there?” It’s as if we were seeing our home town for the first time…and, although we were fascinated, we were also collectively creeped out. At least we didn’t see ourselves or anyone we know doing something embarrassing in the street… Anyway, it didn’t take long for our self-obsession to get old, so we virtually left Raleigh and started touring other lucky cities. I went to Manhattan to look for where my brother works, then to Brooklyn to check out where he lives. Then I went to Phoenix to see if I could see any adobe houses, and then to Salt Lake City to see the mountains

Search 1, Google.
“blog success”
results: included a disconcerting yet fascinating series of phrases like “monitize” and “optimize” and “leverage the power of the internet.”

Search 2, Google.
“writing a business plan?”
It was at this point that my friend and I started twitching with discomfort…are we really researching “business plans?”

Fortunately for us, another friend briefly visited. She whisked in and immediately dropped a philosophical bomb on us: “Isn’t it crazy how time flies and how it’s so hard to do the things we used to do, like work a full day, go out for dinner and drinks, go see a band, and still make it to work on time the next day?” She then abruptly left saying “I gotta go! I’ve got something in the oven…not in my oven…. ha ha ha!”

That quick conversation, encompassing the passage of time, youthful energy (or lack thereof) and the very idea of parenting made us wonder…Didn’t people 20 years ago look older at our current age than we do? We’re aging better now than they did 20 years ago, right?

Search 3, Google.
“xx year old woman in 1987″
“xx high school reunion of the class of 19xx”

results: not helpful. Hmmm, well, people are having children at older ages than they used to, soparents have to have more energy, and thus stay younger looking, right?

Search 4, Google.
“Having children later in life”
“Older Mothers”

results: Mommy-Come-Lately, a site with lots of pics of happy families where the parents are older. They all look great, which does kind of prove our point that people look great today, but it still didn’t help us with what the same ages of people looked 20 years ago.

While we were perusing this site, we were, of course, singing “Johnny-come lately…the new kid in town…” Who was that by anyway? Oh yeah, wasn’t it the Eagles? Yes. When was that song?

Search 5, Google
“New Kid in Town, Eagles”
results: Wikipedia. New Kid In Town was on the Hotel California album and hit #1 on Billboard charts in February of 1977. And did you know that the Eagles got together in 1971 as a group to back Linda Ronstadt? When they later created their own band, the name, The Eagles, came as a nod to The Byrds. All of the Wikipedia infoand history of the Eagles is quite interesting. We probably could have spent the rest of the night doing VHI-ish “Behind the Music” Googling, but in this one instance, we decided to consciously come back to our original distraction on the exploration of aging.

We decided TV history might have some answers (it always does).
Search 6, Google
“TV women over xx in the 1980’s”
results: “Between Friends,” a 1983 HBO flick starring Carol Burnett and Elizabeth Taylor as middle-aged divorcee friends. I have to admit, I found it a bit unnerving that these two actresses even knew each other, let alone liked each other and starred in a movie together. We couldn’t find any really good pictures from this movie, but we did find a LIFE magazine cover “Liz Taylor is 40!” from 1972. She looks good, but 40-year-olds today look younger than that, I’m sure of it.

What about the TV show, “Roseanne?”
Search 7, Google
“Roseanne, TV show”
results:There’s a a great pic of the cast on the Oxygen website here. Check out Roseanne – she looks pretty darn good, and she doesn’t really look very old either.

How old do you think she’s supposed to be in this part of the series anyway?
Search 8, Google.
“how old was Roseanne in the TV series?”
results: Wikipedia. The character was born in 1952. Becky, the oldest kid, was born in 1975, and she looks to be about 18, so that means the character Roseanne is about 41 here.

Becky looks way different than I remember her…like completely different. Yeah, do you remember there were 2 Becky’s, but they never actually said anything about the fact that the actresses changed? Oh yeah!

Hmmm, She looks familiar for some reason.
Hey, isn’t that the chick on Scrubs?

Search 9, IMDB
“Scrubs.”
IMDB click: Sarah Chalke
Sure enough, it’s her! She apparently got the part when the other Becky, Alicia Garanson, left to go to college.

Anyway, her face looked different the last time I saw Scrubs. Like her lips looked different. Did you notice that? Yeah. Search 10, Google:
“has Sarah Chalke had lip implants?”

Another diverging Google search result immediately caught our attention:
“Tara Reid opens up about botched plastic surgery.”

You’ll have to search that one yourself, because it was at this point that my friend and I realized just how far we had strayed from our quest of learning more about blogging. And we didn’t really learn anything that interesting, except that content really does affect ads – look at all those plastic surgery ads to the right! (And the trivia that the second Becky is the chick from Scrubs is bound to be useful somehow)… sometimes it’s the ride rather than the destination that makes the internet fun.