I was going to post a question in GQ, then thought better of it and said - hey, we’ve all done this: you’re bored, you’re poking around with Google Maps, checking out how things look from the sky…then you pause, squint a little bit, and wonder what in Thor’s name are you seeing? (by “we’ve all done it,” of course, I mean I’ve done it and I now I’ve seen a few other similar questions posted here).
Mine’s right here. It’s just south of the National Air Force Museum, which is on Wright-Patterson AFB in Ohio. If you’re interested in planes and happen to find yourself in Dayton, I recommend it. Anyway, two things in the picture have me curious. One: that…thing carved out of the grass at the bottom, that looks vaugely like it ought to be on the power button of my laptop.
Two: That…thing, up on the concrete (that I think was once a taxiway to the runway). Here’s a closer look. It looks like it could be ‘masking’ whatever’s actually on the ground there, for ‘security purposes’, but I don’t recall seeing anything else like that before.
If you think that X marks the spot place is wacky from above…
It’s a HUGE retirement community, each building is themed, seriously, THEMED. Note the street names. Jeb Bush spoke there, most politicians do. It is a huge place and distinctive in that in all the years it’s been there, they have never had a condo assessment, and it is pretty immaculately maintained, pretty cheap and you can play golf for free. However, the weirdness factor is hard to deal with. A few years ago, you could buy a unit for about $55k.
It’s called Top Of The World. It’s like visiting a theme park.
If you zoom in all the way on that photo, you can see some of what Auntbeast is talking about. It kind of looks like some of the buildings have something like a rooftile canopy over the front pavement, and there’s at least one that looks like it might have a “castle” facade, with end and center towers and crenellations on top of the front walls. Oh, and can’t forget the one that looks like it has a HoJo orange roof entry on each end.
I’ll try and ride by this place to figure out what it really is, but from the photo it looks like someone tried to build a stadium with a river running through the middle of it.
Damn, that’s a shame. I had in mind the image of an F-104, in the twilight of its years, stealing one night of passion with a much younger Airbus. Years later the child would go on a search for its father in an attempt to explain why it felt the urge to both ferry passengers along established commuter routes and fire a sidewinder up the tailpipe of a Chinese MiG.
I like this theory. It’s not ‘inexplicable’ in the context of a city as crowded as Tokyo, and appears to have an outdoor (offroad?) section to the east.