Shaq Tweets Retirement, the Most Photographed Place in NYC, and Eclipse Buzz

Adriana Diaz


Tweeters are sending their best wishes to Shaquille O'Neal. The Boston Celtics star announced his retirement from professional basketball yesterday by tweeting a link to a 10-second video. After the video got out to his nearly 4 million Twitter followers, "Kazaam" started trending. If you don't remember it, that's the 1996 movie Shaq starred in as a rapping genie. Tweeters mentioned Kazaam in jest, suggesting that Shaq will now have time to make "Kazaam 2." O'Neal is also spiking in Yahoo! Search, where we've seen buzz for his shoe size (size 22) and previous mixed martial arts training. According to our data, 48 percent of searchers were women.

Now onto New York City trending news: what do you think is the most photographed place in the Big Apple? The Statue of Liberty? The Empire State Building? The Brooklyn Bridge, perhaps? Nope. According to the photo website Flickr, it's the Apple flagship store on Fifth Avenue. Using geo-location tags, researcher Eric Fischer analyzed the locations of millions of photos taken in Manhattan. He found that the No. 1 hot spot snapped in New York is the cubic glass Apple Store, which was inspired by the Louvre Museum's glass pyramid entrance. Wondering what location got second place? According to Fischer, the silver medal goes to the very photogenic Rockefeller Center, home of the famous Christmas tree. Columbus Circle comes in third place, and Times Square is forth. For Fischer's analysis of the most photographed places in cities worldwide, check out his Flickr page.

Jumping from ground level to outer space, the Web is buzzing about the three eclipses happening in the next two months. The first of the three was a rare midnight solar eclipse that took place last night. It was visible only in the northern-most parts of the world, and almost seemed to travel back in time. It started on June 2 in China before crossing the International Date Line and ending on June 1 in Canada. The next eclipse will be lunar on June 15 and will be seen in Asia, Europe, and Africa. The last of the three will take place on July 1 but will not be visible to most humans. That's because it's during the Southern Hemisphere's winter and the sun will be below the horizon for almost all of Antarctica, save a small uninhabited stretch on the continent's coast.

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