270 - Movie Maps of the World

 

You’d think that in the world of global cinema, the US is the dominant force. You’d be wrong. Think New Zealand, India and Iceland. Of course these cartograms (i.e. maps distorted to demonstrate some kind of information) fall into the third category of untruths enumerated by “lies, damned lies and statistics”. Having these these cartograms demonstrate other aspects of the film industry would undoubtedly result in radically different maps. 

These particular cartograms distort the sizes of the world’s countries in relation to the average budget per feature film, the number of films produced per capita and the total number of films produced per country.

On the first map, showing average budget per feature film, the surprising giant is New Zealand – for once looming large over its neighbour to the west, in fact, Australia could fit in between the North and South Islands. I can’t think of any other explanation for New Zealand’s size than the very expensive Lord of the Rings trilogy, shot on location in that country between October 1999 and December 2000.

Even if we revert to things as usual and ignore New Zealand, America’s size is less than impressive. You would think that all those blockbuster movies would have a greater effect on the average American feature film budget. But maybe the ‘big’ movies obscure the fact that the US produces many more ‘small’, low- or no-budget movies.

On the second map, showing number of films produced per capita, another thinly populated island nation is unexpectedly dominant – Iceland. Admittedly, it doesn’t take many movies in this country of barely 300,000 to get a good films per capita ratio. The other Nordic countries are also doing pretty well on this map, especially Denmark, outsizing all other European countries (except Iceland, of course). Slovenia is also doing noticeably well.

Regional dominance in Asia is achieved by Hong Kong, its unfamiliar shape for once outsizing the other Asian countries – even India, which is struggling to keep up with Israel.

The US manages its biggest relative size on the third map, showing the total number of feature films produced, dominating the American continent (much less so in the previous two maps), but with strong competition in Europe (notably France), Africa (a huge Nigeria) and of course Asia (a giant India shows the clout of its ‘Bollywood’, churning out more movies annually than the US).

This is also the only map that shows up a Japan larger than life. Australia and New Zealand have dwindled back into obscurity. Bizarrely, Portugal is almost invisible, whereas in the previous map it broke out of its Iberian partner Spain’s stranglehold.

Notably absent (or very atrophied) on all three maps are Latin America (Cuba punches above its weight on the second map, but that’s about it), Africa (Nigeria being the most striking exception), Russia, the Middle East and much of Asia.

 

These cartograms, an advert for Volkswagen showcasing the car manufacturer’s support for independent cinema, appeared on the back cover of this week’s film magazine from The Observer, the British newspaper. Thanks to Jon Morris for scanning them and sending them in.

269 - What A Great War: Art From the Trenches

The First World War ( 1914-1918 ) obviously didn’t get that name while it was still raging, on account of the Second one still being a few decades in the future. Some called it ‘the War to End All Wars’ (which didn’t quite turn out that way), others labelled it ‘the Great War’, although that qualifier was a bit misleading - more a comment on its size than on its enjoyability.

Not that there wasn’t any fun to be had in the trenches, in between bouts of severe carnage. This helmet is a nice example of trench art, showing a map of the Western Front. The brim of the helmet is marked ‘H.G. Booth, 110th TMB AEF France 1918-’19’. Henry G. Booth was a cook for the 110th Trench Mortar Battery. AEF stands for ‘American Expeditionary Force’.

The helmet map shows

 

• England (with London, Winchester, Dover, Southampton, Hull and Liverpool indicated)
• Holland (‘Amstradam’ marked)
• Belgium (one city highlighted, name not legible)
• Luxemburg (a bit too large)
• the Alsace (shown separate from Germany and France; the city of Metz indicated)
• the north of France (with Calais, Lille, Le Havre, St Malo, Brest, Paris and three other cities shown) and
• part of Germany (Cologne, Coblenz, Mayence – i.e. Mainz).

 

This map taken here from the website Trench Art. Thanks to blogfok for sending me the link.

 

 

 

268 - Jamerica the Beautiful

People of a very religious disposition have been known to see the face of Jesus in a slice of burnt toast, or the Virgin Mary’s silhouet in a tree. Map-nuts similarly observe simulacra of states and continents in everyday objects.

“I’ve seen photos of clouds resembling maps, pancake surface patterns,” writes Bjørn Bojesen. “But never a blob of jam.”  And then: “I was just making a sandwich, and there it was – America on the chopping board!”

Both the Atlantic and Pacific coastlines of South America are wonderfully rendered, the accretion of jam at the left hand side even  symbolizing the Andes mountain chain. Central and North America are somewhat less true to life, but their general shape is not that far off. As jam-based maps go, anyway.

Although “there is something really weird going on in Alaska,” as Mr Bojesen readily admits. The Aleutian islands have morphed from a narrow island chain into a gigantic terrestrial tentacle, sticking into the Pacific Ocean and almost touching the West Coast.

On the other side of the continent, Cuba and/or other Caribbean islands have hypertrophied and are drifting east into the Atlantic.

Thanks to Mr Bojesen for sending in this picture of ‘Jamerica’.

 

 

267 - EU Plots to Destroy Britain - Again

It’s déjà vu all over again. Post #163 of this blog (d.d. Aug 5, 2007) dealt with a secretive plan by the European Union to carve up the United Kingdom into several transnational zones, linking parts of the UK with parts of the Continent and wiping out the British state in the process.

The plan was ‘revealed’ by the europhobic Daily Mail. This time around, it’s the equally populist newspaper The Sun that has ‘discovered’ the same plan, albeit with a slightly different map. It must be that the europhobic segment of the Great British Public love a good EU horror story and don’t mind being scared twice by the same one. I don’t know if the deliberatlely misleading article, oozing paranoia and xenophobia, should make me laugh or cry:

“Secret plans reveal the South of England will be renamed TRANSMANCHE – and governed in part by bureaucrats in France.”

“Two more ‘Transnational’ zones are also being set up to ‘promote the territorial agenda’ of t he EU. The ATLANTIC REGION – stretching thousands of miles from the northern tip of Scotland to southern Spain – will take in western England and Wales, along with parts of Portugal and France.”

“And the NORTH SEA REGION will cover chunks of eastern England and eastern Scotland, Sweden, Denmark, Germany, Holland, and the Flemish part of Belgium. The Atlantic will have its headquarters in Portugal, the North Sea in Denmark.”

“Ironically, news of the carve-up comes on St George’s Day – England’s national day. Critics, including the Tories, claim the new regions ‘ignore thousands of years of history and wipe England off the map’.”

The Sun only obliquely refers to the responsibilities with which these consultative bodies will be tasked: tourism, town-twinning, the environment, shipping and transport – which hardly amounts to “reshaping national boundaries”.

Thanks to James Cribbs for pointing me to the article and the map in The Sun.

266 - Where News Breaks

As any journalist knows, news has to be about people - they either make it, or are affected by it. No people, no news. It therefore stands to reason that heavily populated areas of the US, like California or the Northeast, generate most of the news stories. But even allowing for population, some locations account for a disproportionately high number of news items.

Researchers extracted the dateline from about 72,000 wire-service news stories from 1994 to 1998 and modified a standard map of the Lower 48 US states (above) to show the size of the states in proportion to the frequency of their appearance in those datelines (below). Some notable results:

* Washington DC accounts for a huge proportion of the news stories - not surprising, since it is the nation’s capital, and the home of Congress, the Presidency and other political news generating institutions. But still: DC (pop. 600,000; metro area 5.8 million) generates more news than the most populous state, California (pop. 36.5 million).

* New York is the largest news provider of the country, of course nearly all originating in New York City (pop. 8.2 million; metro area 18.8 million). Compare this to Illinois, home of the the nation’s third largest city, Chicago (pop. 2.8 million; metro area 9.5 million). Especially when considering metropolitan areas, Chicago/Illinois should be half the ‘news size’ of New York City/New York, while in fact it seems to be less than one fifth. Could this underrepresentation be down to another ‘capital effect’ (i.e. New York being the ‘cultural capital’ of the US)?

* News stories from Texas (pop. 20.8 million) seem overly scarce, especially when compared to, say, Georgia (pop. 8.2 million), which seems to get a bigger share. Could this be due to the fact that major news organization CNN is headquartered in Atlanta?

* The Dakotas, Nebraska, Kansas, Montana, Wyoming and Idaho, with a combined population of under 9 million, are all but invisible. No people, no news? Colorado alone, with a population of under 4.5 million, is responsible for a much larger chunk of news than those states combined. Could this be because the other states lack large cities, while Colorado has Denver (pop. 600,000; metro area 2.5 million)? No cities, no news?

This cartogram, originally from the August 2004 issue of Science News magazine, where it illustrated an article entitled ‘A Better Distorted View: The Physics of Diffusion Offers A New Way of Generating Maps’. Many thanks to Christian Schumann-Curtis, who sent it in.

265 - Olympic Rings of Fear: Japan’s Air Raid Angst (1938)

At some point early in the previous century, island nations particularly were gripped with air raid angst. The relatively new threat of airborne destruction was especially poignant for countries that for centuries were able, for defense purposes, to profit from their aquatic isolation – countries like Britain or Japan.

It seems the Japanese were already holding air raid drills as early as the 1920s, and tried harder than other nations to limit aerial bombing by treaty. To no avail, as history has shown; Japan’s pre-war fears about destruction from the sky would be surpassed beyond belief by the horror of the two atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of the war.

This air raid awareness map dates from 1938, and shows exactly whom the Japanese were frightened of – not China, for instance, even though that was the only country they were at war with at the time. The Chinese, reduced to fighting a guerilla war against the Japanese invader, probably couldn’t muster an air force.

Japan was olympic in its air raid angst: the land of the Rising Sun is surrounded and entirely covered by five differently-coloured rings, each showing a radius of action of 2,000 km (1,242.7 mile). At the center of these five potentially inimical radiuses are:

Alaska (yellow circle): probably the island of Attu, the westernmost US possession – and the site of the only World War II battle on US soil. America recaptured the island from a Japanese garrison after bloody hand-to-hand combat at the end of May 1943. Two months later, it was the starting point for the first US raid on Japanese soil since the 1942 Doolittle Raid. As indicated by this map, the attack range was limited to the Kurile Islands, north of Japan proper.
Vladivostok (green circle): Soviet bombers would be able to cover the whole of Japan, all of Korea (at the time a Japanese colony), all of Manchuria (in pink, north of Korea; a Japanese puppet state) and most of Japanese-occupied China (in orange).
Hong Kong (black circle): British bombers stationed here could reach over half of Japan’s mainland possessions, plus Japan’s southern tip.
Manila (brown circle): the Philippines were a US possession until 1946; US bombers stationed here would be able to reach some of southern China, Formosa (i.e. Taiwan, also in Japanese hands at the time) and the very southern tip of Japan itself.
Chichijima (grey/blue circle): or ‘Father Island’, an island in the Ogasawara archipelago.

The island of Tinian, whence Enola Gay took off to drop the first atom bomb, is over 2,500 km (1,560 miles) to the south of its target, Hiroshima. Tinian, one of the Northern Mariana Islands, is not indicated on this map, nor is Hiroshima. The three white dots in Japan are, west to east: Kokura, Osaka and Tokyo. Hiroshima is also situated in the south of the country, near Fukuoka, but on the western tip of the main island Honshu.

This map was sent in by Nils Jeppe, who saw it on Airminded, a blog about ‘Airpower and British society, 1908-1941 (mostly)’. From one niche blog to another, passing by like (air)ships in the night: good-bye and good luck!
This post (a follow-up of a previous post about air raid posters) has this Japanese poster, and several others (including ones where the concentric circles signify ICBM ranges, and a cool British one, warning about the dangers of German zeppelins launched from Heligoland).

264 - An Absolut Mexico

Ay caramba! Absolut Vodka has found a surefire way to put its US sales figures in a downward spiral. This map, used in a Mexican ad campaign, shows what the US-Mexican border would look like in an ‘absolut’ (i.e. perfect) world: a large part of the US’s west is annexed to Mexico.

Needless to say this map made its way to ‘El Norte’, annoying and upsetting many Americans – even leading to calls for a boycott of the Swedish-made vodka. What must be particularly annoying is that this map has some basis in fact.

Large swathes of the western US used to be part of Mexico. In 1836, American settlers proclaimed the independence of Texas, formally a Mexican territory. The US annexation of Texas in 1845 prompted the Mexican-American War (1846-1848), after which Mexico was forced to cede 525,000 square miles of territory (42% of its pre-war territory, 12% of the US’s current territory).

Mexico didn’t have much choice: a US army occupied Mexico City, and the alternative was total annexation. The Mexican Cession consisted of the territories of Alta California and Nueva Mexico, out of which were eventually formed the US states of California, Nevada and Utah, and parts of Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico and Wyoming.

In this ‘absolut’ version of the world, the US and Mexico are about the same size. As gratifiying as it might be for Mexicans to see the loss of Texas and the Mexican Cession be reversed, this map managed to offend so many Americans that it prompted Absolut Vodka to release a statement:

“We are sorry if we offended anyone. This was not our intention. We will try to explain. Though you may not agree, I hope you understand.”
“We have a variety of executions running in countries worldwide, and each is germane to that country and that population. This particular ad, which ran in Mexico, was based upon historical perspectives and was created with a Mexican sensibility. In no way was this meant to offend or disparage, nor does it advocate an altering of borders, nor does it lend support to any anti-American sentiment, nor does it reflect immigration issues. Instead, it hearkens to a time which the population of Mexico may feel was more ideal.”
“Obviously, this ad was run in Mexico, and not the US — that ad might have been very different.”

This map was sent in by Jeremy Yingling, Danny Dorfman, Nate Maas, Jim Yu, Nick Collecchi and Dubi Kaufmann. Here’s a link to it at the LA Times

263 - Functional Geography 2.0: France, the Ideal Household Utensil

Well, the jury is in. The country with the most functional geography is… France. As proved by this diagram, France’s jagged, hexagonal shape makes it the ideal, multiple-use household utensil:

• The Pas de Calais, at the very top of the country, bordering Belgium and the English Channel, is transformed into a diamant coupe-verre (glass-cutter)
• Peninsular Normandy doubles as a handy décapsuleur (bottle-opener)
• Brittany, stabbing into the Atlantic Ocean, makes for a nice fourchette (fork)
• Broadening out into the Bay of Biscay downstream from the city of Bordeaux, the Gironde estuary is a coupe-ficelle (wire-cutter)
• The Pyrennées, the mountain chain forming the border with Spain, are transformed into a hâchoir (meat-mincer)
• The sharp edge where the Alsace-Lorraine region juts furthest into Germany serves as a pied-de-biche (crowbar)
• France’s interior is taken up by a gril (grill pan)

And while several US states and other countries boast purely geographical panhandles (e.g. Oklahoma, West Virginia, Namibia), France gets a real one stuck in its Franche-Comté region – probably Swiss-made, by the look of it.

This handy household item, named Le Gaulois (‘The Gaul’), looks like it could be a big hit on those all-night tv shopping channels. Wouldn’t you want one?

Merci beaucoup à Emmanuel Parfond de m’avoir envoyé cette carte.

262 - Made In Taiwan: Functional Geography

“On a recent trip to Taiwan, I purchased this bottle opener at the Taipei 101 building (technically still the tallest building in the world until the Burj Dubai opens),” writes John Sperling. “The functional part of the bottle opener is in the shape of Taiwan. It makes you wonder which other countries are suitable for everyday tasks like opening bottles.”Picture provided by Mr Sperling.

261 - The Civil War and the Death of ‘Horizontalism’

In 1852, when New Mexico was at its newest, the territory bearing that name was more than double the size of the eponymous present-day state. Of the many changes that were to follow, none was more dramatic – from a cartographic point of view, if you’ll allow – than the creation of the Union Territory of Arizona.

This destroyed a tradition of ‘horizontalism’ in the administrative divisions of the territory, still clearly visible on this map: the east-west-orientation of the counties creates elongated slices of land that are pleasingly improbable to govern. Just imagine being the sheriff of Bernalillo County. Or worse, his horse.

And yet it may not have been practicality, but spite that caused the Union to set up a ‘verticalist’ Arizona Territory, thus thwarting the ‘horizontalist’ Arizona Territory of the Confederacy. Or maybe it was a very practical spite, thus dividing the pro-Confederate south of the New Mexico Territory in two.

All this will make a bit more sense in its chronological context:

1852 - The US territory of New Mexico, acquired as spoils of the Mexican-American War, covers most of what were to become the states of New Mexico and Arizona and southern bits of the future states of Nevada and Colorado.

1853 - The US buys an additional 30,000 square miles (77,000 sq. km) of Mexican territory. This Gadsden Purchase, named after the US Minister to Mexico, cost the US $10 million, and allowed it to construct a southern transcontinental railroad. The original plan was for the purchase area to be much larger, even including all of the Baja California peninsula (and four Mexican states: Coahuila, Chihuahua, Sonora and Nuevo Leon). This was opposed by the Mexicans and by anti-slavery US politicians, but vehemently regretted by the filibuster William Walker, who marched into Mexico with a small army, and established the short-lived independent Republic of Sonora.

1855 – the Gadsden Purchase officially added to Dona Ana County in the New Mexico Territory.

1861 – After a gold rush, and to secure the area for the Union at the beginning of the Civil War, the Territory of Colorado is established. It replaces the provisional (and unrecognised) Territory of Jefferson, which was a much larger square than Colorado – including an eastern strip of Utah, a southern third of Wyoming and the western protrusion of Nebraska. The Territory of Colorado is made up of far-flung parts of the Territories of Utah, Nebraska, Kansas and New Mexico.

1861 – pro-Confederacy settlers in the southern half of the Territory proclaim the Confederate Territory of Arizona (identical to the areas of the Socorro and Dona Ana Counties on this map), aided by the fact that they are removed from the pro-Union administration in Santa Fe by the Jornada del Muerto (’the journey of the dead man’), a difficult stretch of desert. The CTA links the Confederacy all the way to California.

1863 – Having ousted Confederate forces from the area, the Union creates its own Arizona Territory, but does this by slicing the original New Mexico Territory in eastern and western halves (creating the present state border), rather than northern and southern ones.

1866 – Nevada absorbs the part of the Arizona Territory west of the Colorado River and south of the 37th parallel. The transfer followed a gold rush, with the government judging Nevada would be better suited to manage the influx of migrants.

1912 – In January, New Mexico is the penultimate state of the Lower 48 to receive statehood. In February, Arizona is the very last.

This map was sent in by Brian Fletcher (of Bernalillo County, NM), who found it at this page of the New Mexico Genealogical Society. “All of these counties (mentioned on the map) survive to this day in a different form except for Santa Ana,” he says.

260 - You’ll Never Moonwalk Alone

On July 21, 1969, Neil Armstrong became the first human to walk on the moon. He didn’t moonwalk alone – ‘Buzz’ Aldrin joined him on the surface – and he didn’t walk far.

After travelling hundreds of thousands of kilometers, the landing crew of the Apollo 11 lunar mission barely covered an area the size of a football pitch.

Many thanks to John Mark Boling for sending in this extremely cool map, found at this page of the NASA history division website.

If ‘football’ makes you think of a game played with helmets, please substitute ’soccer’. And if soccer is too alien for your liking, this map from the same website overlays the ground covered by the Apollo 11 landing team on a baseball diamond…

259 - Unnamed Methane Sea On Titan

Except for some of the harsh, impermanently inhabited and sparsely visited inlands of Kerguélen, there are no places left on Earth to name.

Those with a penchant for baptising should look to the priesthood, or take a more literal interest in heaven – there are ever more known worlds out there, and precious little of those exoplanets have been explored, let alone provided with toponyms.Even within our own solar system, the field is still wide open. Although all planets and moons in our solar system have been named, many of their geograpical features haven’t.

Titan, Saturn’s largest moon, was discovered in 1655 by Christiaan Huygens. Titan is larger in diameter than the smallest planet, (Neptune) Mercury, and 50% larger than our own Moon. It is the only moon in our solar system to have a dense atmosphere – so dense that, in combination with its limited gravity, humans on Titan could fly by just flapping their arms.

The orange opacity of Titan’s atmosphere makes the moon appear bigger than it actually is – astronomers have since distinguished between permanent cloud cover and surface, and downgraded it from the first- to the second-largest moon in our system, after Jupiter’s satellite Ganymede.

Not until the flyby, in 2004, of the Cassini-Huygens mission could scientists confirm the speculation, first ignited by both Voyager missions and then heightened by Hubble observations, that Titan is the only heavenly body (save Earth) to contain large liquid surfaces – or seas, as non-astronomers would call them. For they seem a bit too small to be labelled oceans.

These seas, or lakes, most probably consisting of methane or another hydrocarbon, can be seen on this page of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena.

Cue Peter Minton, a teacher from San Diego with a thing for maps, for mapping and more precisely still for mapping shorelines. His website shows the many maps he has made, most with more conventional subjects than these seas on Titan. Mr Minton used the data at the JPL to create this map of Titan’s Unnamed Methane Sea (his relevant page here), detected in mid-2006 by Cassini probe (which is slated to make the last of its 21 flybys mid-May 2008).

Fascinating. It looks a bit like the Aral Sea, although that might just be me confusing this colour scheme with satellite pictures of the Central Asian lake, shrinking into the desert. The many rivulets and islets make it look like a nice lake to vacation at, until you remember that there’s something unpleasant in the air there (– 98% nitrogen). A shame: how nice it must be to flap your arms and fly over the Superior-sized lake. But then again, the sunlight hardly penetrates Titan’s cloud cover, so you wouldn’t see much. And the average temperature is -180°C (-290°F). Can we go home now?

The naming bit, then. First off, many features on Titan have already been named. To not offend anyone except scientists, and as is customary in extraplanetary toponymy, the names are chosen mainly from mythology: Xanadu is an Australia-sized hilly and craggy area near the Equator (and the fabled location of Kubla Khan’s stately pleasure dome), Menrva is a 440 km wide basin of impact craters (and the Etruscan version of the goddess Minerva), Guabonito is a partially buried impact crater (and a Taino goddess), etcetera.

A bit disappointingly, I just discovered that the lakes have also been named. Wikipedia lists the names of 12 potential lakes, all designated as lacus and named after existing Earth lakes (e.g. Ontario lacus), although it’s not clear which of those lakes is supposed to be the one drawn here by Mr (Burton) Minton. I say its shape looks a bit like that of the northern half of Greenland. But that’s hardly an appealing name – Lake North Greenland (although I don’t think there’s any tourist board out there to complain about it). How about Lake (Burton) Minton, in honour of its mapper? Although Unnamed Methane Sea has a nice, ominous ring to it. Any other ideas? Or should I just go to Kerguélen on my own?

This map was sent in by Paul Drye. With a name like that, he’d best not discover any lakes. Or seas.

258 - An Ocean Of Water, And Not A Drop To Drink: A ‘Map On Temperance’

Temperance not only is one of the four Cardinal Virtues of Catholicism (and one of the five Precepts of Buddhism), it’s also the name of a specific movement gathering steam throughout the 19th century, mainly in anglophone countries, aiming to reduce the consumption of alcohol.

In the US, much of the Temperance Movement was religiously inspired (although by Protestantism rather than Catholicism or Buddhism), and much of it was led by women (such as the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, founded in 1873 and still around today).

The most obvious way to ‘temper’ the consumption of alcohol is not to drink it at all; so the call for Temperance escalated into pleas for Abstinence. But the personal choice not to drink at all is much easier if there’s no temptation around. And thus the Movement moved inexorably from demanding Temperance through advocating Abstinence to pushing for Prohibition - “an intemperate denunciation of temperate drinking,” as G.K. Chesterton once derisively described it.

Temperance, now in the guise of Prohibition, was spread with a religious zeal bordering on the fanatical. In 1851, Maine became the first Prohibition state; four years later, there were already 12 ‘dry’ US states. In 1919, the 18th Amendment extended Prohibition to the entire US. Jubilant Temperance zealots were predicting the end of crime, and prepared to promote the benefits of Prohibition in other countries.

But this is where the Temperance wave crested. Far from reducing crime, Prohibition actually gave organised crime a serious boost - e.g. Al Capone and other ‘classic’ American gangsters. Prohibition was not only impopular, but eventually untenable. The 18th Amendment is the only one to have ever been rescinded (in 1933, by the 21st).

This ‘Map On Temperance’ was printed at Howe’s Sheet Anchors Press in Boston around 1846, thus dating from the ascendancy of the Temperance movement. It shows the straits, bays and channels of the Ocean of Life, which is dotted with islands, provinces, kingdoms, territories and regions. All features are named after aspects of alcoholism (in the West) and of Abstinence (in the East).

The Alcohol Islands lie in the northern part of the Ocean, separated by Dissipation Straits and Folly Straits from the wicked lands to the West. The islands are: Brandy Island, Rum Island, Cider Island, Wine Island, Malt Island, Gin Island, Whiskey Island and Cordial Island. Other features on or between these islands are: Rum Sellers Shoals, Temptation Straits, Cape Ale, and, towards the gloriously alcohol-free lands to the East, Moderation Passage and Temperance Straits.

The lands of drink are, north to south: Topers Possession, Sickness Province, Indolence Kingdom, Poverty Territory, Fury Region, Reprobate Empire, Dishonesty Kingdom, Crime Empire, Lunacy Province and Misery Regions. Each territory contains toponyms associated with each of the defects described by their name. The Misery Regions are dotted with Infamy, Ruin, Woe and Horror; Hatred, Malice and Revenge are contained in the Fury Region; and Sloth, Indigence and Lazy Harbour (a particular favourite of mine) can be found in Indolence Kingdom.

The ‘dry’ lands in the East are, north to south: Repentance Kingdom, Resolution Province, Fortitude Territory, Wisdom Empire, Friendship Regions, Industry Province, Morality Kingdom, Religious Possessions, Happiness Empire and Contentment Province. Vices are more colourful than virtues – but still, some interesting toponyms here are: the Religion Channel, Cape Sobriety and the Gulf of Reform.

Drifting in the southern Ocean of Life, almost as if it were on a mission due west is – yep – Missionary Island, with a Persuasion Bay and an Exhortation Coast. Between the island and the dry land are the Washingtonian Straits. This might be a reference to the politicians in Washington who still need to be convinced of the need for Temperance legislation, but I’m not sure.

Below the actual map is a rhyming road map explaining the route from the perilous ‘wet’ lands to the blessed ‘dry’ lands. An Explanation crowns the whole simile between map and life:

Life is an Ocean, both extant and wide;
Man’s the Ship, that doth o’er its surface glide;
Happiness the Port, we ever strive to find;
Temperance must be the Pilot, to navigate the mind;
Reason then takes the helm, free from doubt,
To steer the course – as by Heaven pointed out.

This map was sent in by Natalia Fisher and can be found on this page at Brown University in Providence (RI).

257 - Switzerland’s ‘Röstigraben’, a Curious Culinary and Cultural Divide

Switzerland is predominantly German-speaking, but far from completely so. The alpine confederation is officially quadrilingual: German (64%), French (20%), Italian (7%) and Romansh (0.5%). As the latter two languages are very minoritary, linguistic tension does tend to be a binary thing, between Deutschschweiz – a word only a germanophone could pronounce – and la Romandie, signifying the Swiss French west of the country.

The Romands call the ‘other’ side la Suisse alémannique and the Schweizerdeutsche call the francophone part of their country Welschschweiz (the root word being a Germanic term for ‘stranger’, identical to the one in ‘Wales’ and ‘Wallonia’).

The language border dividing these two areas is known jestingly as the Röstigraben (in German) or the rideau de rösti (in French). A Graben is a ditch and a rideau is a curtain, so you get the idea of separation – but what a Rösti is and why it is significant, requires a bit more explanation.

This dish is made mainly by frying grated potatoes in a pan. It was formerly eaten as breakfast by farmers in the (German-speaking) Bern canton. The original conceit of the Röstigraben was that it constituted the western limit of the German Swiss culture, beyond which people spoke (and ate) differently.

The Rösti has gained popularity as a side dish all over Switzerland, but the language and cultural differences persist. The French Swiss voters have traditionally been less averse of the international community (including potential EU membership) and more prone to support a more active role for the federal government. Recently, voting trends in French and German Switzerland have tended to converge more.

The Röstigraben isn’t the only gastronomically defined cultural border in central Europe. The northern and southern halves of germany are separated by what is called the Weisswurstäquator – the white sausage equator, after a favourite dish in Bavaria that’s rarely eaten in the north.

Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be a map of this particular equator around. The book cover used here (and found here) shows a picture of a very literal Röstigraben – a Switzerland-shaped Rösti broken in two exactly where the language border runs. That the ditch wasn’t too hard to cross, is apparent by the name of the author, Laurent Flütsch: his French forename and German surname suggest his parents had a quite intimate knowledge of the ‘other’… 

256 - The Surrealist Map of the World (1929)

Just as light is not supposed to bend, so the Equator should not waver from its rectitude. The fact that it snakes across this map like a hose through a garden indicates that this is a very weird world indeed.

How weird? A first indication is the size of Alaska – way too big even if you allow for the distortion of the Mercator projection, which is also ballooning Russia to a size much bigger than its already huge actual surface, but this super-sized Russia is not out of line with accepted mercatorial deviance.

Closer inspection of the American continent reveals a gigantic Labrador, bordering on Mexico, to which is appended an atrophied version of South America. Not just atrophied, but completely missing are the United States and Canada (not to mention all other Central and South American countries, save Peru, which takes up all of its subcontinent).

Two para-American islands are affected by gigantism: Easter Island, which looks like a teddy bear pointing towards Peru, and Tierra del Fuego, at the southern tip of the Americas, looking like a lizard running west… the low resolution of this image leaves much to the imagination.

Asia and Oceania are similarly blighted by gigantism (Hebrides, New Guinea and an illegible archipel, China and Afghanistan) dwarfism (Australia, India) and not-there-ism (Japan, Sri Lanka, much of the Middle East).

Africa is tiny, Europe is almost entirely covered by Germany, Ireland is looking straight at Europe across the Britain-less North Sea. Only two cities are marked on the map: Paris and Constantinople…What’s the point of this map? Well – its point is that it hasn’t any, except to bewilder and shock bourgeois viewers by presenting a bizarre alternative to the stale normality of their expectations.

Which is a neat summary of the surrealist world view – not co-incidentally, the title of this work is Surrealist Map of the World. It first appeared in 1929 in a special issue of ‘Variétés’, a Belgian magazine, dedicated to surrealism – an art form remembered for its absurdity, but less for its political views.

In discussing this map in her excellent book You Are Here, Katharine Harmon quotes a Surrealist manifesto from 1925:

“Even more than patriotism – which is a quite commonplace sort of hysteria, though emptier and shorter-lived than most – we are disgusted by the idea of belonging to a country at all, which is the most bestial and least philosophic of the concepts to which we are all subjected.. Wherever Western civilization is dominant, all human contact has disappeared, except contact from which money can be made – payment in hard cash.”

This map was found here.

255 - Hitler a Star? An Unlikely Map of ‘A Better Sky’

Have you ever seen the constellation named ‘The Tyrants’, spanning the stars Robespierre and Kubla Khan, stringing together Hitler, Mussolini and Attila along the way? Or how about the stars Washington, Lincoln and Roosevelt in the constellation ‘United States’? And then there’s the stars Stalin, Lenin and Tolstoi sharing the constellation ‘Russia’….

You’ve seen all of these stars before, you’ve just never heard them called these names. Good thing A.P. Herbert isn’t around anymore to mourn the total oblivion of his plan for renaming the constellations. In 1944, the eccentric Englishman published ‘A Better Sky, or, Name This Star’, a book in which he expounded his proposal to change the names of stars and constellations in order for them to be more recognisable and easier to learn for the contemporary British student.

In 1944, the British government still had other things to worry about than renaming the heavens. Reviewing Mr Herbert’s book in a 1944 issue of The Observatory magazine, G.K. McArthur, retired Instructor-Commander in the Royal Navy, writes: “Should not an attempt be made to persuade the schools to include elementary astronomy and navigation in the curriculum? Here is an opportunity for a keen navigator and zealous reformer like Mr. Herbert; perhaps a more valuable exercise for his brilliant powers than hoisting Hitler and Mussolini with other mortals into the sky.”

Mr Herbert’s attempt to rename the stars was not the first one – equally unsuccesful attempts have been made to change them to the names of Christian apostles, slugs, ships and planes, apparently. Nevertheless, Alan Patrick Herbert can still be remembered for other things: he was a writer, humorist and law reformer, serving in the House of Commons for 15 years and in the Royal Navy during the First and Second World Wars.

He campaigned for modernising the laws on divorce, obscenity and alcohol licensing – once famously taking the House of Commons to court for the (illegal) sale of alcohol on its premises. As a writer, he is best remembered for his ‘Misleading Cases’, satirical law reports of fictional court cases, often written from the point of view of serial litigator A.P. Haddock, and adapted for television by the BBC. He also wrote eight novels and 15 plays, including a light opera.

This map of the heavens renamed has the following constellations –

Canada, The Tyrants, Europe Regained, China, The Airman, The Music Maker, Science, The Gorgeous East, The Story-Teller, The Poet, The Painter, The Islands, The Jester, South America, Australasia, The Player, The Doctor, Russia, The Philosopher, Great Britain, The Statesman, The Soldier, The Traveller, The Sailor, South Africa, The Rebels, The Heroes, King’s Cross, The Children’s Corner, The Women, United States.

I recognise Great Britain as Ursa Major and I suspect The Sailor to be Orion, but that’s as far as it goes, at first glance. A larger map can be viewed by clicking on it, but the names of the individual stars remain not entirely legible.

254 - Ludacris’ Rap Map of US Area Codes

“I’m a female and a feminist. I dislike the usage of the word ‘ho’. However, as a geography major, I find this song hilarious, and had to map it,” says Stefanie Gray, referring to ‘Area Codes’ by the rap artist Ludacris.

Rap, for those less familiar with the term, is a genre in which the rhythmic delivery of rhyme and wordplay constitutes the main element of the music. Rap relates to singing as racewalking relates to running – but that’s just my inexpert opinion.

Rap music has been criticised for its content, which often consists of crude and ludicrous bragging about the rapper’s lyrical, financial, criminal, physical and sexual prowess. ‘Area Codes’ could be considered as an example of this phenomenon, sometimes referred to as gangsta rap:

“I’ll jump off the G4, we can meet outside/So control your hormones and keep your drawers on/’Til I close the door and I’m jumping your bones/3-1-2’s, 3-1-3’s (oh), 2-1-5’s, 8-0-three’s (oh)/Read your horoscope and eat some horderves (sic)/Ten on pump one, these hoes is self serve/7-5-7, 4-1-0’s, my cell phone just overloads.”

“In this song, Ludacris brags about the area codes where he knows women, whom he refers to as ‘hoes’,” says Ms Gray, who plotted out all the area codes mentioned in this song on a map of the United States. She arrived at some interesting conclusions as to the locations of this rapper’s preferred female companionship:

• “Ludacris heavily favors the East Coast to the West, save for Seattle, San Francisco, Sacramento, and Las Vegas.”
• “Ludacris travels frequently along the Boswash corridor.”
• “There is a ‘ho belt‘ phenomenon nearly synonymous with the ‘Bible Belt’.”
• “Ludacris has hoes in the entire state of Maryland.”
• “Ludacris has a disproportionate ho-zone in rural Nebraska. He might favor white women as much as he does black women, or perhaps, girls who farm.”
• “Ludacris’s ideal ‘ho-highway’ would be I-95.”
• “Ludacris has hoes in the Midway and Wake Islands. Only scientists are allowed to inhabit the Midway Islands, and only military personnel may inhabit the Wake Islands. Draw your own conclusion.”

Ludacris is not deterred by clever and/or strong women? The concept of Ludacris’ song reminds me a bit of ‘I’ve Been Everywhere’ by Johnny Cash, which, come to think of it, probably shares some subtext with ‘Area Codes’.

Map kindly provided by Stefanie Gray.

253 - Germany Surrounded by Switzerland

The town of Büsingen am Hochrhein is one of two foreign enclaves enclosed within the territory of Switzerland (*). Büsingen has a long, intimate knowledge of borders, being located on the old limes between the Roman empire and the Germanic barbarians.

Ever since the mid 14th century, Büsingen has had Austrian overlords – at the end of the 17th century, the abduction, trial and death sentence of the Lord of Büsingen at the hands of the neighbouring Swiss canton of Schaffhausen almost led to war between Austria and Switzerland.

It’s said that due to this near-war, the Austrians decided to never relinquish control over Büsingen to the Swiss, just to spite them. When Austria sold its rights to the nearby villages of Ramsen and Dörflingen to the canton of Zürich in 1770, Büsingen effectively became an enclave within Switzerland.

In 1805, the Peace of Pressburg handed Büsingen to the kingdom of Württemberg, in southern Germany. Five years later, the town came under the overlordship of the Grand Duchy of Baden. Eventually, with German Unification in 1870, Büsingen became part of the German Empire.

A whopping 96% of the inhabitants voted for annexation by Switzerland in a 1919 referendum, but since the Swiss couldn’t offer Germany any territory in return, Büsingen remained, somewhat reluctantly, German.

As Büsingen is in a customs union with Switzerland, it is outside the European Customs Area. Other peculiarities caused by its exterritoriality:
• the common currency in Büsingen is not the euro, but the Swiss franc.
• Swiss police may pursue and arrest suspects in Büsingen, but no more than 10 Swiss police officers are allowed in the town at one time.
• Similarly, there may never be more than 3 German police officers per 100 inhabitants.
• There are two postal codes in this one town, a German one 78266 Büsingen; and a Swiss one: 8238 Büsingen (D). You can use Swiss or German stamps for your letters.
• Büsingen’s only petrol station advertises that it’s the cheapest in all of Germany – on average 30% cheaper.

(*) later more on Campione d’Italia, an Italian exclave in southern Switzerland.

This map taken here from Jan S. Krogh’s excellent GeoSite.

252 - A River Runs Through It: the Chamizal Dispute (1895-1963)

Ever since the Mexican-American War (1845-49), the Rio Grande has been the border between the two nations from El Paso to the Gulf, giving Texas a natural southern boundary. Fixing the border on a river might seem a tidy solution. But while rivers last longer than most treaties, they are also bound by none. When a river shifts, it shifts, treaty or no.

Does the border then trace the old riverbed or the new one? Naturally, both parties would prefer the outcome that left them the most territory (and the other the least). A war, anyone? International law has a rule for this particular clash between fluctuation and demarcation: if the river changes course gradually, through erosion, the border follows. If the river radically changes course, through avulsion, the border should remain where it was before.

By 1895, the Rio Grande – and the US – had moved south about 600 acres (2,4 sq. km), a disputed area known as El Chamizal. Mexicans filed claims to the land south of the old riverbed (but north of the new one), an arbitration commission was established and it eventually proclaimed in 1911 that each country should receive part of the disputed area:
The US was to receive the area between the riverbed as originally surveyed in 1852 and the riverbed as it had shifted southwards by 1864, the rest going to Mexico, even though this was to the north of the later riverbed of the Rio Grande.

The US did not accept this split decision, leading to sustained tension with Mexico and the development of a curious zone in El Chamizal, called Cordova Island. This was a virtual Mexican island in the disputed zone, leading to a grey zone that fostered crime and illegal border crossings.

In 1963, US president JF Kennedy and Mexican president Adolfo Lopez Mateos agreed to settle the Chamizal Dispute along the lines of the 1911 recommendations.

• The US and Mexico each received 193 acres of Cordova Island;
• Mexico received 366 acres west of Cordova Island, and 264 acres to the east of it.
• Mexico and the US shared the cost of a man-made channel that would (or should) prevent further blurring of the border.
• US citizens in the Chamizal area were relocated and compensated for the loss of their homes and businesses.
• A Chamizal National Memorial, an amphitheatre, a bookstore and a museum were established in the area, which every October hosts several cultural events such as the Border Folk Festival and the Siglo del Oro drama festival.

This map, found at this page at answers.com, would have benefited from a better dating of the three sets of riverbeds, which I assume must be the ones from 1852 (’old boundary’), 1864 (’Relocated River Channel’) and around 1895 (’Rio Grande’).

251 - Pot Kettle Black: Yugoslav Map of the Near-Collapsing US

“While on vacation in Dubrovnik, Croatia this summer, we ran across an old Yugoslav atlas which included this map on the entry for the US. My Serbo-Croatian isn’t so good so I don’t know the true details as to what it’s about, but it appears to be plans for a Russian invasion,” says Andrew, who sent in this map.

“Submarines labelled SSSR are on both coasts. The apparent flight paths of ICBMs are marked. Cuba’s soldiers and bases are indicated (…) If you can figure out more precisely what’s going on I’d certainly be curious, and I imagine that other readers would get a kick out of it.”

My Serbo-Croatian isn’t very good either, but the map does seem to speak the language of the Cold War. Guessing the exact year is complicated as national borders in the Americas have remained stable in the last few decades, unlike in other parts of the world, where they allow easier carto-dating.

A look at the actual legend of the map does allow for some closer dating. Item #3 (the red vertical stripes) indicates the pro-soviet regimes in the hemisphere – Cuba and Nicaragua. The inclusion of that second country limits the timeframe of the map to 1979-1990, the era when the Sandinistas were in control of Nicaragua.

Although the Soviet navy has got the North American continent completely surrounded, in my opinion, the map does not demonstrate a Soviet plan of attack, but restates the Communist ideological orthodoxy of the US as an aggressive, unstable monstrosity at near-collapse – a remarkable example of the pot calling the kettle black.

• Whereas blue indicates the US itself (Sjedinjene Americke Drzave, acronym SAD – but that is a coincidence, I presume), yellow indicates ’separatist’ forces at work in the North American continent, such as Quebec (although that is a Canadian, not a US issue) and Black Muslims (around Chicago) and Mexican-Americans (in Texas). Again, a pretty remarkable comment, coming from a Yugoslav atlas.
• Item #5 on the legend indicates, I think, ‘disputed’ marine boundaries, mainly between Canada and the US, thus misrepresenting the mainly friendly relations between those two countries – the disputes might be real, but their significance is relatively minor.

Anyone able to elucidate on the meaning of the other symbols? Please do!

250 - Who Put the ‘Gau’ in Gaucho? A (Forged) Map of Nazi South America

“Hitler has often protested that his plans for conquest do not extend across the Atlantic Ocean. I have in my possession a secret map, made in Germany by Hitler’s government – by the planners of the new world order. It is a map of South America and a part of Central America as Hitler proposes to reorganize it,” revealed US President Franklin D. Roosevelt in his Navy Day address to the nation, broadcast on 27 October 1941.

The map, however, was a fake. World War II revisionists (not to put too fine a point on it: those who would have preferred the Nazis to win) claim this proves that FDR was a war-mongerer, prepared to lie shamelessly in order to drag the US into war. But in this case, FDR might have been more mongered against than mongering – the map most probably was a British forgery, not an American one.

While FDR indeed was a steadfast advocate for a more active US role in the unfolding conflict, he was up against formidable internal resistance to entry into war. It was the British who had more to gain from American involvement, because they had everything to lose. In this phase of the conflict, Britain stood virtually alone, Nazi Germany controlling most of the European continent and kicking Soviet butt in the early months of Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of the Soviet Union. The US would only be dragged into the war after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, later that same year, on December 7.

For Britain, desperate times called for desperate measures, one of which would have been the forgery of this map, the point of which was to instill in the Americans the notion that the Nazis, if victorious in Europe, would not leave the American continent alone, thus challenging the Monroe Doctrine. The story behind the map, as (probably, but not provably) produced by the British intelligence services, went like this:

In October 1941, a British agent managed to snatch this map from the bag of a German courier straight after the latter’s involvement in a car crash in Buenos Aires. The map showed how the Nazis intended to reorganise South America into five satellite states, each one a Gau with a German Gauleiter:

• Guyana (encompassing British, Dutch and French Guyana, but wholly under the tutelage of the – collaborating – French government headquartered in Vichy);
• Neuspanien (New Spain, an agglomeration of Venezuela, Colombia, Equador and Panama – meaning the Panama Canal, at that time under US sovereignty, would at least indirectly come under Nazi control);
• Chile (being a fusion of Peru, part of Bolivia and Chile itself, dissected halfway by an Argentinian corridor to the Pacific port of Antofagasta);
• Argentina (Argentina itself, Uruguay and Paraguay, and the aforementioned Antofagasta corridor);
• Brazil (being Brazil, plus part of Bolivia).

Interestingly, the map’s legend stresses: Luftverkehrsnetz der Vereinigten Staaten Süd-Amerikas – Hauptlinien. (’Air Routes in the United States of South America – Main Lines’), indicating that these states would be joined in a well-connected subcontinent-wide political union (most likely a Nazi-induced shotgun wedding). Such a unified behemoth under German control would inevitably pose a threat to the US, FDR proposed in his Navy Day speech: “This map makes clear the Nazi design, not only against South America but against the United States as well.”

As it turned out, World War II hardly touched South America. Only after the war did it gain some notoriety as the hideout of many top-level Nazis, including Eichmann (caught by the Israelis in Argentina) and Mengele (died peacefully in Brazil).

This map was sent in by Joseph Eros, who copied it from the article ‘FDR and the Secret Map’ by John F. Fratzel and Leslie B. Trout Jr. in the 1985 New Year’s edition of Wilson Quarterly.

249 - South of No North: Country Music’s Favourite States

Off the top of your head, how many songs do you know that mention US states, either in their title or in the lyrics? Here’s how far I got:

• “It Never Rains In Southern California” (The Mamas & The Papas?)
• “Paris, Texas” (Ry Cooder)
• “Bikini Girls with Machine Guns” (by The Cramps, although only in the ‘cleaned-up’ version for radio and tv: “I’ve been a drag racer in Tennessee” replacing the reference “on LSD” on the album version)
• “Alabama” (Neil Young)
• “Sweet Home Alabama” (Lynyrd Skynyrd’s response to Young’s lamento)
• “West Virginia” (John Denver)
• “Birmingham” (”The greatest town in Alabam’,” according to Randy Newman)
• “Colorado Girl” (Townes Van Zandt)
• “Georgia On My Mind” (Ray Charles)
• “Johnny B. Goode” (who lived “Down in ‘Ouisiana“)

This totally unscientific sample seems to confirm what this hopefully better-researched map visualises – even though it deals only with states mentioned in country lyrics: that Southern states are sung about much, much more often than Northern ones.

Many thanks to Allen Garvin for discovering and sending in this gem. “I love this map because Texas rightfully takes its place as the largest state in the Union”, writes Mr Garvin, who keeps the map on his website (here).

True, but I think that Tennessee has gained more in size than Texas has, relatively speaking.

• The winners seem to be, in order: Tennessee, Texas and Louisiana.
• West Virginia normally is much smaller than Virginia, but here is almost twice the size of its parent state.
• All the traditional (deep) southern states seem to be represented fairly well, with the notable exception of an atrophied Florida – all those vacationers from the North preclude the profitability of serenading the Sunshine State.
• California seems to be doing relatively well, with a number of ‘in-between’ states receiving some mention: Kentucky, Oklahoma, Colorado, Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico, Colorado, Arkansas, Missouri, Kansas, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio.
• Every other state (i.e. ‘The North’) put together barely seems enough to fill Tennessee. Canada is about the size of Colorado. Mexico is much larger, almost as big as California.

Very few people are neutral about country music – it’s either loved or loathed. It can also be seen in a post-emotional way, as an expression of genuine Americana, living folklore, it’s been used as a yardstick in a variety of scientifical studies.

Mr Garvin has held on to this remarkable map for some years, and unfortunately can’t provide a link to its original context, so it’s difficult to judge the map’s scope and seriousness. The map did remind me of another, more notorious piece of universitary research a few years ago, which did seem to demonstrate a correlation of country music with suicide (”Country music is hypothesized to nurture a suicidal mood through its concerns with problems common in the suicidal population (…)” More here).

A tear in my beer, indeed.

248 - Friends, Polypotamians, Countrymen!

No one seems to regret that Thomas Jefferson’s plan for the division of the Northwest Territory into ten new states was shelved. The proposed names were just too silly, writes 19th-century Jefferson-biographer John T. Morse, Jr.:

“The names suggested for these ten States are a peculiar mixture of Latin and Indian, and while a semblance of some of the names still remains in two cases, in all others it is so absolutely forgotten that the very fact has ceased to be known by many close students of American history. Yet, besides this humane and noble piece of statesmanship (the proposed prohibition of slavery in the territory) we have a glimpse of that absurd element in Jefferson’s mind which his admirers sought to excuse by calling him a ‘philosopher’. The matter is small, to be sure, but suggestive. He proposed as names for the several subdivisions of this territory: Sylvania, Michigania, Cheronesus, Assenisippis, Metropotamia, Illinoia, Saratoga, Washington, Polypotamia, and Pelipsia.”

In 1787, the fledgling new republic for the first time expanded beyond the borders of the original 13 states. The area between the Great Lakes and the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers was annexed via the Northwest Ordinance, which also resolved long-simmering rivalries between the original states, most of which had claims to territories out west, by creating new states rather than expanding existing ones.

It did take a while before the states as we now know them took shape. Statehood in the Northwest Territory was gained consecutively by Ohio (1803), Indiana (1816), Illinois (1818), Michigan (1837), Wisconsin (184 and finally Minnesota (1858).

All of which might not have come to pass if the committee, chaired by Thomas Jefferson in 1784, had gotten its way. This committee proposed to divide the Northwest Territory into 10 states of roughly equal size, and even had names ready for them. Names with an antique ring to them, possibly to lend a bit of credibility to the then still precarious business of westward expansion.

• Sylvania would have covered much of present-day Minnesota, Michigan’s Upper Peninsula and some of northern Wisconsin.
• Michigania would have incorporated most of Wisconsin, but nothing of Michigan.
• Most of Michigan’s Lower Peninsula would have been the state of Chersonesus, which is simply the Greek word for ‘peninsula’.
• The northern part of modern-day Illinois would have been the state of Assenispia, after the Assenisipi River, also known as the Rock River.
• In between Assenispia and Pennsylvania would be the state of Metropotamia, a name referring to the many rivers originating there.
• The states of Illinoia, Saratoga and Washington would have incorporated large parts of Illinois, Indiana and Ohio respectively.
• Polypotamia (‘Land of Many Rivers’) and Pelisipia would have covered the western and eastern parts of Kentucky, mainly (and therefore are partially outside the Northwest Territory, as it is bounded to the south by the Ohio River, Kentucky’s northern border).

There is some disagreement as to the spelling of some of the states (Chersonesus is sometimes spelled Cherronesus or Cheronesus, Assenispia is sometimes rendered as Assenisippis or Assenisippia) and even on the number of proposed states, with some saying Jefferson had 17 new states in mind (although only 10 are named in his proposal).

Adding to the confusion is the unclear status of the territory south of the Northwest Territory (nowadays the states of Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama and Mississippi), contested between the Spanish, the US and several states with individual claims.

Jordan Penny, who was kind enough to make and provide this map of the ‘Jeffersonian’ Midwest, populates the area south of Kentucky with the states of Equitasia (western Tennessee) and Jefferson (eastern Tennessee), and has three states where there now are two: a more narrow Alabama, a state of Adams in the southern part of Mississippi, which in this version covers only its northern part.

Is anyone able to provide more information on the names of the states and their exact location in Jefferson’s “absurd” plan?

247 - All the World In A Song

As most news bulletins prove, the world is not, alas, an harmonious place. The same point is proved, if inadvertently and on a more symbolical level, by this stunning musical map of the world.

This is a pretty clever translation of the shape of the world’s continents into the dots, ties and bars of traditional musical notation, but ironically, its main claim to harmony is visual, not aural.

For even though the legend over the top left hand corner of this World Beat Map reads harmonious world beat, I suspect the result of this piece being played would be anything but harmonious to the ears.

I don’t read sheet music (I prefer to listen to the stuff), but the outline of the continents, though perfectly familiar and expected as such on a normal map, seems just too jagged and capricious when translated into notes – not to mention temporally chopped up by the bars travelling from left to right and top to bottom.

Of course, I could be wrong. Anyone more familiar with music in its written form, and how to squeeze it out of an instrument, is cordially invited to comment on this song’s playability, enjoyability and harmoniousness.

This map is published by Wild About Music, Inc. and is for sale at this page of their website.

UPDATE: On April 19, 2008, Krissy Clark of Weekend America interviewed James Plakovic about his harmonious world beat map. Listen to the interview - and the map - here.

246 - Southern Sauce Sources

  ”Tell me what you eat”, the famous quote by legendary chef Brillat-Savarin goes, “and I’ll tell you who you are.” The dictum also applies very locally, to South Carolina, and very specifically, to barbecue sauce.”We barbecue enthusiasts find it fascinating,” says John Shelton Reed about the peculiar example of culinary cartography he sent in, which was taken from ‘South Carolina: A Geography’ by Charles F. Kovacik and John J. Winberry (if you don’t at least have a middle initial, you’re not really Southern).The map shows the state of South Carolina divided into four regions, according to the preferred style of condiment used on barbecued food.

• The vinegar and pepper region covers the eastern quarter of the state. This is “a southward extension of eastern North Carolina-style sauce,” states Mr Reed.
• “The tomato region ditto for North Carolina’s Piedmont- or Lexington-style sauce, which is basically the eastern sauce with a little tomato added, still thin and vinegar-flavored.”
• The ketchup region is influenced by what they serve in Georgia “and most of the trans-Appalachian South – or for that matter in grocery stores – a thick, sweet, ketchupy sauce.”
• Unique to South Carolina, though, is “the mustard sauce of central South Carolina, (which) is unique to that state, and (which) gives it more distinct barbecue regions than any other.”

This peculiarity can be explained by “the German names of the principal purveyors of mustard-based sauces (…) it does seem that most are descended from the great 18th century wave of German immigrants to the Southern uplands.”Thanks for that fascinating bit of gastronomy-meets-genealogy-meets-cartography, Mr Reed. I’m feeling a bit peckish now…A final word on that most appetite-inducing word, the barbecue – its etymology is not, as I always thought, French (from the roasting of wild boars snout to tail, or in French barbe à queue) but apparently it’s an americanism, in fact a real Southern word, derived from the New World-Spanish expression barbacoa, itself taken from the Arawak language, where barbakoa means something like ‘wooden support beam’.

245 - Love’s Topography: la Carte de Tendre

One of the earliest, and most influential examples of sentimental cartography is the Carte de Tendre, an example of the highly refined imagination prevalent in 17th century French literary salons.  (another one is entry #59 on this blog, a German map of the Empire of Love) 

The fictional country of Tendre (‘Tender’) was inspired by Clélie, Histoire romaine, a novel by Madeleine de Scudéry (1607-1701), whose much-frequented and tone-setting salon was one of the focal points of Préciosité, a rarefied literary genre noted for its effusive erudition and gallantry.

The map of Tendre is a topographic allegory, representing the stations of love as if they were real paths and places.

The country is bisected by the Inclination (‘Disposition’), a river that runs south to north, joined by two smaller rivers, the Estime (‘Respect’) and the Reconnaissance (‘Gratitude’), before plunging into La mer dangereuse (‘the Dangerous Sea’), which is separated from a reef-ridden narrows from Terres inconnues (‘Unknown Lands’). To the west are the decidedly choppy waters of the Mer d’Inimitié (‘Sea of Enmity’).

The smooth flow of the rivers symbolises the control over passions, the perils of the sea the danger of unbridled emotions. Straddling the rivers are three eponymous capital cities: Tendre-sur-Estime, Tendre-sur-Reconnaissance. Places along those rivers mark the waypoints of ‘civilised’ love – and some of its pitfalls:

Marking the road from Nouvelle amitié (‘New Friendship’) to Tendre-sur-Reconnaissance are the following towns, purportedly representing a gradual increase of affection:

• Complaisance (‘Kindness’ or ‘Smugness’)
• Soumission (‘Submission’)
• Petits soins (‘Care of Small Things’)
• Assiduité (‘Attentiveness’)
• Empressement (‘Eagerness’)
• Grands services (‘Great Favours’)
• Sensibilité (‘Sensibility’)
• Tendresse (‘Tenderness’)
• Obéissance (‘Obedience’)
• Constante amitié (‘Constant Friendship’)

However, close to the forbidding rock fortress of Orgueil (‘pride’) in the extreme south-west are places to be avoided, such as:

• Meschanceté (‘meanness’)
• Medisance (‘disparagement’)
• Perfidie (‘betrayal’)
• Indiscretion (‘indiscretion’)

Equally avoidable are the localities leading from Nouvelle amitié towards the Lac d’Indifference (‘Lake Disinterest’): 

• Négligence (‘Negligence’)
• Inesgalité (‘Inequality’)
• Tiédeur (‘Lukewarmness’)
• Légèreté (‘Levity’)
• Oubli (‘Oblivion’)

Leading towards Tendre-sur-Inclination and beyond to Tendre-sur-Estime are the towns of:

• Grand-esprit (‘Great Wit’)
• Iolis Vers (‘Beautiful Verse’)
• Billet galant (‘Gallant Letter’)
• Billet doux (‘Sentimental Letter’)
• Sincérité (‘Sincerity’)
• Grand Coeur (‘Magnanimity’)
• Probité (‘Probity’)
• Générosité (‘Generosity’)
• Exactitude (‘Punctuality’)
• Respect (‘Respect’)
• Bonté (‘Goodness’)

This map was found at this page of the University of Richmond (Virginia, US).

244 - 5 Million Hits - The Atlas of Strange Maps - Your Help Requested

5,000,000 Hits

Thirty hits - that’s how many this blog accumulated for the whole of September 2006, the first month of its existence. The numbers for October were a bit better – 3,000 hits – but still nothing to write home about.

The 123,000 hits for November were a bit of a shock for me, but in December the numbers slumped again, to under 40,000. The numbers kept on climbing and falling, with the generally upward trend so beloved by stock traders, and the 500,000 mark was reached on March 24 of the next year, after about 90 posts.

The millionth hit swung around on June 3 of 2007, and thanks to a few very popular posts, the 2 million mark was reached barely a month later, on July 10. Although the hits haven’t kept on increasing as near-exponentially as they did then, the number of visitors has been steady, and high: 10,000-plus on most days, a couple of ten thousands on busy ones.

All of which today adds up to the ten-fold of that first milestone, less than a year ago: 5,000,000 hits. That’s, erhm, stupefying. The last time I had any personal connection with a number that big was when as a kid I was given some bank notes in lira, the famously worthless Italian currency, and became an instant millionaire – just like most of the beggars on the streets or Rome at the time.

This numerical enumeration should not detract from the fact that Strange Maps is not about big numbers, but about, well, strange maps. The mission of this blog remains to find, present and discuss cartography that is fictional, obscure, bizarre, or for some other reason not readily available in regular atlases. To the readers of this blog: thanks for your continued interest, your many map suggestions and your often illuminating comments.

The Atlas of Strange Maps

Strange Maps grew out of a love for maps, and a frustration with atlases. As much as I love to read atlases, most of them essentially tell the same story. The blog was meant to be a repository of maps unlikely to be included in one of those ‘regular’ atlases – an ‘anti-atlas’ (geography buffs might appreciate the double-entendre) aiming not for any kind of comprehensiveness, but only to surprise and delight the many people who love maps.

Even an ‘anti-atlas’ itches to be published, and the 5,000,000 mark might be a good moment to announce that there shortly will be a real-life book, tentatively titled The Atlas of Strange Maps. An agreement to that effect has been concluded with Viking Studio Press, an imprint of Penguin USA.

Although the Atlas will be based on the blog, it will not be a quick-and-dirty blogsploitation job. I’m selecting the best maps on the blog for the book, rewriting the entries to incorporate the many necessary corrections and helpful additions provided. I’m also looking for maps that have not appeared on the blog to be incorporated into the book.The Atlas of Strange Maps will be inspired by the eponymous blog, but will stand apart from it.

Your help requested

I am still determining which of the maps on the blog can be included in the book, and which other maps currently not on the blog might be interesting additions for the book. Several factors are at play – originality, quality and beauty of the map – but an equally crucial one is copyright.

For maps to be included in the book, I will need written permission of the relevant copyright holders. I have been contacting some of those copyright holders (and gotten positive responses from most), but this is a slow, sometimes frustrating process, because copyright holders are often very difficult and sometimes even impossible to trace.

I therefore would like to take this opportunity to put the question directly on the blog, and hopefully reach as many copyright holders as possible this way.

If you are the copyright holder of a map on this blog (or of a ’strange map’ not yet included here), and would like to be included in the Strange Maps book, please do send me a mail.

• please include your name and address, as those will need to be on the permission form that I will send you, which you will need to sign and return to me, either via regular mail or as a pdf.
• your copyright will be mentioned in the book, as well as the books or other media context in which the relevant map appears.
• All copyright holders whose map(s) will be included in the book will be provided with a free copy of the book (due to the large number of books to be sent, postage will have to be charged).

All correspondence should be directed to strangemaps@gmail.com. Please mention the word ‘copyright’ in the subject header.

Thanks!

243 - A Map of the Republic of New Netherland

New Amsterdam never gave way to New York. The Dutch kept the whole of their North American colony out of the hands of the perfidious English, in fact. New Netherland today constitutes a thriving Republic stretching from the Atlantic coast to Québec, dividing New England from the rest of the United States.

This Republik van Nieuw Nederland is the brainchild of Paul Burgess, who’s been fleshing out its allohistorical details since his mid-20s – he’s even devised a pretty cool flag for the Republic, not to mention an anthem (’Onze Patrie’ – ‘Our Fatherland’), names for the baseball teams in the Knickerbocker League, a list of the best places to smuggle goods across the border to the US and even call letters for New Netherland radio stations. And, of course, this map.M

r Burgess’ fictional country has its origins in a PoD (Point of Divergence) in the year 1638, when not the irascible Willem Kieft, but the level-headed David Pietersen de Vries is appointed Director-General of the colony. De Vries pushes for colonisation, good relations with the Five Nations tribes, self-government and expansion and consolidation of the borders.

New Netherland achieved independence in 1798, after the ‘old’ Netherlands were overrun by the French. Philip Schuyler, the last Director-General of the colony, became the first Prime Minister of the independent Republic. Influential successors were PMs Maarten van Buren (1820-1856), and the Roosevelts: Theodore (1897-1919), Franklin D. (1930-1945) and Quentin (1948-1965), Theodore’s son.

The Landdag (Parliament) is comprised of the lower House of Burghers and the higher House of Peers.According to the 1980 census, New Netherland measures 71,288 square miles, counts 31,2 million inhabitants and is divided in 13 provinces, one city (New Amsterdam) and one freeport (Philadelphia). Most populous city is the capital, New Amsterdam (7 million). About 85% of the New Netherlanders speak Dutch, 9% English (mainly in Philadelphia, New Haven, Hartford and eastern parts of Vermont and Long Island) and 6% one of the Iroquois languages. This excludes the rather more complicated situation on the New Netherland Antilles. The provinces and their capital cities are (English names in between brackets):
• Adirondacken (Adirondacks), capital Plattsburgh
• Antillen (Antilles), capital Willemstad
• Bergen, capital Amboy
• Kaatskillen (Catskills), capital Wiltwyck
• Zwaanendael (Delaware), capital New Amstel
• Erie, capital Buffalo
• Genesee, capital Irondequoit
• Hudson, capital Fort Orange
• Iroquois, capital Onondaga
• Nassouwen (Nassau), capital Heemstede
• Nieuw-Haven (New Haven), capital New Haven
• Oranje (Orange), capital Fort-Nassau
• Vermont, capital Burlington

With thanks to Mr Burgess, for providing a higher-resolution map than the one on this website (please scroll down).

242 - Nearer the North: Australia in the King Projection

For cartophiles, the main problem with this map is not that interviewer Larry King’s head covers most of Europe, or that the bulky figure of his guest, moviemaker Michael Moore, obscures much of America. The problem is not what it hides, but what it misplaces.

See the huge island continent of Australia? Well, you shouldn’t. Most of it should be hidden beneath the desk, in between Messrs King and Moore. But Oz seems to have lost its mooring, drifting north to the latitudes of the Philippines, immediately off Australia’s west coast, and Hawaii, not far from the Queensland coast (but obscured by Moore’s black sweater – an unfortunate choice and probably proof he’s not a regular viewer of the show).

The island of New Guinea, to Australia’s north in real life, has gone along for the ride in this fantasy world of the King Projection and will, if present drifting persists, bump into either the Kamchatka or Alaska peninsulas.

Why did Mr King deem it necessary to move Australians closer to the region they call the Near North (and many others still call the Far East)? Maybe it’s that talkshow décors share with nature in general that they abhor a vacuum. That would explain the Brazil-shaped blob behind Mr King, headed for Europe and soon colliding with Ireland, filling out the otherwise glitterless Atlantic Ocean.

Thanks to Josh for sending in the picture, by the look of it a grab off YouTube.

241 - Every Englishman Is An Island…

… But some are more insular than others. Turner Prize winner Grayson Perry, according to this disputed article on Wikipedia “best known for his ceramics and his cross-dressing”, is the artist behind this obsessively detailed cartographic self-portrait.

His Map of An Englishman (2004) is a mock-Tudor etch of an imaginary island, not coincidentally resembling a brain, surrounded by Psychopath, Bipolar Disorder, Schizophrenia, Delirium and other unpleasantness at sea; divided into counties with alluring names such as Tender, Bitch, Romance, Cliché and Guru – Normal and Easy are pretty small areas, and Fear is a large, scary forest in the east.

Hills, houses and castles, but mainly churches, dot the countryside, each bearing the name of character traits (or flaws) or other words somehow connectible the artist, expressing prejudices, fears, desires, vanities and other attributes of the artist, ranging from Two-Car-Family and Stuck over Cuddly and Intersubjectivity to Dream-Date and I’m-Out-Of-Control.Some elements seem to be thematically grouped together, hence the region labelled Posh is thick with place-names like Chattering, Broadsheet, Yoga, Chardonnay, School Run and Bulemic.

The map was sent in by Paul Razell, who “saw Grayson Perry’s Map of an Englishman at the British Museum in November 2007, and have been meaning to bring this to your attention.” Many thanks! The original location of this image is here, some more info on the map here at Artificial Gallery.