The Register®

Original URL: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/09/08/streetview_graffiti/

StreetView gets the willies in Victoria

Look what popped up in the middle of nowhere…

By Richard Chirgwin

Posted in Bootnotes, 8th September 2011 01:39 GMT

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In the great tradition of pranking Google’s photographers, someone has penned a phallus on a Google StreetView camera-van in Australia.

It pops up in the appropriately-named town of Long Gully, near Bendigo in Victoria, and continues through Maiden Gully (no, really).

The graffito was apparently first noticed by BuzzFeed [1].

Here’s something of a mystery, however.

The willy is on the east-facing camera as the vehicle travels down the Calder Highway towards Maiden Gully – or, perhaps, away from Maiden Gully if it was on the rear camera. It appears / disappears either side of an intersection in the middle of nowhere, changing from a willy-free view a few hundred meters west of the Calder Highway / Murdoch Lane intersection to a “green hornet” in the shot a few hundred meters eastwards.


View Larger Map [2]


View Larger Map [3]

The images make it clear that there’s nothing much around: no town, no café or service station, nothing.

So: did the driver decide the clean the camera after a bug-splat? Was the driver carrying a passenger who took advantage of the driver popping behind a tree? Does the inaccurate representation mean that it was painted by an alien taking a break from terrorizing rednecks? We may never know. ®

Update: Some readers have trouble seeing the graffiti in the embedded images above. So here it is, close to the vantage point where it was first found. I was merely intrigued that it would either arrive or disappear at such an out-of-the-way spot. ®