1. Live lightning strike map
Blitzortung shows you where lightning is happening right now! You can choose your continent and watch as thunderstorms happen somewhere you don't live. Comes with satisfying clicky noises.
2. Live flight map
I love Flight Radar. If you live on or near a flight path, you can look up what type of plane and airline is disturbing your knitting. And if you're excited by someone coming to visit you (or going far far away), you can watch the path of their plane as it tootles about. Cool.
3. Live shipping map
If boats are more your sort of thing, the imaginatively named Marine Traffic lets you look at... well... marine traffic. All kinds of boats are shown, so you can look at the passenger ferry your mate is on, or posh yachts off the coast of posh places.
4. Live piracy map
Staying with shipping, but slightly less jolly, is the ICC's live piracy map. It's less Johnny Depp and parrots, and more criminals nicking stuff and shooting people. Still, at least it shows you the places to avoid (and gives you an excuse to buy a plane ticket).
5. Live DDOS attacks map
Your favourite website down? It could be due to a DDOS attack (ie people breaking the internet on purpose). The Digital Attack Map shows you live DDOS attacks around the world, with lots of useful stats which we're too stupid to understand.
6. Live flood map (UK only)
The Environment Agency has a live flood map on their website, for people who don't notice when it's raining a lot. Bit boring in summer, tbh.
7. Live traffic jam map
Waze is an app that lets drivers tell each other about holdups and accidents, saving you the indignity of listening to local radio for traffic updates. The app can share info without you having to do anything (except open it, obvs) so you won't cause an accident yourself.
8. Live earthquake map
The US Geological Survey earthquake map shows you live quake information from around the world, with locations, times and depths. Plus, if you felt the earth move, you can report an earthquake to them (which doesn't inspire a great deal of confidence in their quake reporting system).
9. Live solar system map
If you like to think big, the Planets Today live solar system map is for you. There's loads of settings you can fiddle about with if you're clever, and some astrology information if you're not.
10. Live map of everything bad
The Global Incident Map claimes to show you forest fires, terrorism, gang warfare and various other horrible things. Annoyingly, you have to log in to view details of any event. But maybe you're better off not knowing.
If that's inpsired you to travel, or at least hasn't put you off, have a look at all the career breaks around the world that you could be on!