Sidetracked

The U.S. government will never find bin Laden.

A 13-year-old kid will.

That’s right. A bored teenager is going to peruse Google Earth’s satellite images, and he’s going to spot a picture of the bearded terrorist posting videos on YouTube somewhere near the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. And then the kid’s going to turn to his equally bored buddy and say, “Dude – I think I just found bin Laden!”

And the buddy’s going to be, like, “You’re such a tool.” And then he’s going to say, “Who’s Ben Laddy?”

And the bored kid on the computer is going be like, “I think he’s that guy from Iraq or something.”

Then the government, which is secretly spying on the kid, is going to be REALLY embarrassed because our entire intelligence community has supposedly been after bin Laden for years but hasn’t been able to locate him because apparently he’s a really good hider. Which, of course, would have made bin Laden really frustrating to play hide-and-seek with as a kid because, you know, eventually it’s no fun if the person who’s hiding is so good, you can never actually find him.

I say this not because I’ve been paid thousands of dollars to promote Google (Call me, Google?), but because I wasted a lot of time on Google last night and thought it’d be nice if I could now waste your time.

A while ago, we learned about Google Earth and its ability to show us photos of just about any place – Dick Cheney’s house excluded — on the planet. Now I’ve learned of a new Google feature: When you visit Google Maps, you can often see a “street view” photo of the address you’ve chosen. Those street view photos offer 360-degree, panoramic images so you can see everything you’d see if you were standing there.

Isn’t that cool? One of our photographers, Joe Johnston, looked up his sister’s place and found a photo of her house – with his two nieces and his sister’s dog pictured in the yard!

Bemused, I tried to find my grandfather’s old place, located about five miles from Wrigley Field in Chicago.

It wasn’t going to be easy, though. Google Maps and Google Earth, after all, don’t always get addresses right. Also, my grandfather’s old place has since been painted, and the front of the house is partially obstructed by a tree.

Luckily, I had this photo I took of my grandfather sitting on his porch about 12 years ago.

 

 Now I could compare the houses across the street to these houses I found on Street View:

Then I rotated the view to see the house across the street — and there it was:

The reproduction is a little dark. But there was no doubt that this was it — the house I visited every Christmas during my youth.

My grandfather’s place was listed as 2442 North Hamlin when it was supposed to be 2428. But, hey – close enough. If he had been a terrorist, I surely would have been able to find him with the information provided.

With that in mind, I became convinced that we will indeed find bin Laden, thanks to Google. But I no longer think a 13-year-old kid will find it.

It’ll be me.

In fact, while I was trolling around Google Earth last night, I think I found some suspicious activity in the mountains not far from Okara. So I think we should send some troops to this spot in Pakistan:

 

Posted on August 1st, 2008 by Pat
Filed under: The World According to Pat