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.

240 - The American Eagle, About to Spread Its Wings

In 1833, The United States didn’t have an East Coast yet, for lack of a West Coast. The gigantic Louisiana Territory, acquired some 30 years earlier from the French, gave America dominion over the Mississippi basin, but Mexican land and the Oregon territory, claimed by Great Britain, still stood between the US and its ‘Manifest Destiny‘ – to stretch “from sea to shining sea”.

That’s a line from Katharine Lee Bates’ song ‘America the Beautiful‘, composed in 1893 when the west was won, mainly by the Mexican-American War of 1846-’48. It would be many decades before all the lands between Mississippi and Pacific would enter the Union as full-fledged states, but the iconic shape of America’s lower 48 states was there.

In 1833, other icons were still vying for public acknowledgement. For example, this Eagle Map of the United States, Engraved For Rudiments of National Knowledge.

The map represents America as an eagle (it looks more like a dove), with its head coinciding with New England (except Maine), its eye with Vermont, its neckline following Lakes Ontario and Erie, the wing outlines Lakes Huron and Superior (and further west the eventual Canadian-American border at the 49th parallel).

The eagle’s breast follows the Atlantic seaboard, its talons form Florida – even though the claws protrude far from the coastline, and somewhat ominously, towards Cuba.

The real reason why this particular iconic representation of America’s national bird never caught on, is in the tailfeathers – shaped to follow a border no longer in existence by 1848. The western borders of the subsequent independent and later US state of Texas are recognisable, for now as the dividing line between the US and Mexico. The feathers follow the US inland border as it moves north, and disappears out of sight at the area disputed with Great Britain.

Meanwhile, the great inland empire of Louisiana is already being divided up into US states, with Louisiana and Missouri separated from the ‘mainland’ of the formerly French lands.

This map was published in Philadelphia in 1833 by Carey & Hart, in a now extremely rare atlas, the Rudiments of National Knowledge, Presented To The Youth of the United States, And To Enquiring Foreigners, By A Citizen Of Pennsylvania.

An image of this map was sent in by antique maps dealer Barry Ruderman, who recently put an original copy of the map up for sale. It’s yours for just under 20,000 dollars, indicating just how rare it is. “This is the first example of the map we have seen on the market in the past 10 years,” states the relevant page at Ruderman’s website www.raremaps.com - not in any way affiliated with Strange Maps, I hasten to add. It just so happens that in this case, the rare map also is a strange one.

239 - Mall-American

Egyptians one generation more ancient than the ones we usually call Ancient Egyptians perhaps thought the pyramids to be detestable eyesores on the desert skyline, and Greeks old enough to remember the good old days before poetry, medicine and architecture might have had a Prince-Charles-like disdain for the doric ‘carbuncles’ clunking up the Acropolises of their once fair country.

But age becomes architecture, and the triangularity of Egyptian and Hellenic architecture is now considered ‘classic’. Similarly, many of the buildings we now find hideous might one day seem so precious that we’ll end up protecting them. No such luck so far for that great American contribution to suburban architecture, the shopping mall, which is still too ubiquitous to be considered salvage-worthy.

A shopping mall can be defined as a conglomeration of retail shops, usually under one roof, with an ironic twist to its accessability: typically only reached by car, as attested by the huge parking areas surrounding it, the attraction of a mall consists of its pedestrians-only policy indoors.

One unconfirmed piece of shopping mall trivia holds that the US has more malls than high schools. While these must include many tiny malls, there are also more than 1,100 ‘regional shopping malls‘, targeting potential customers as far away as 25 miles and often extending to a million square feet.

The shopping mall has been one of the US’s most succesful export products, mushrooming in every corner of the Free World. But in its homeland, boom seems to have turned to bust, with shoppers now being drawn in droves to open-air ‘lifestyle centres‘ or doing their browsing and buying online. Many malls are now abandoned to decay, much like the boomtowns turned ghost towns of the nineteenth century.

Whole websites are dedicated to shopping mall postmortems, which detail the afterlife of these palaces of retail. Malls are intended to be cheery rather than leery, to induce consumption rather than consternation, but they nonetheless have a macabre quality, especially obvious when they’re defunct (as on www.deadmalls.com), serving as a refuge against man-eating zombies (as in George A. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead), or otherwise closed for business.

Consumers have a love-hate relationship with malls: we go to them because we love to shop, or just hang out there, but also because there’s nowhere else to go. Malls are convenient, but also monotonous – any mall is just a reconfiguration of the same store brands you’ll find in any other mall.

Something of that annoyance with the mall-induced Gleichschaltung is expressed in this cartoon, presenting America as one giant mall, completely covered by just over a dozen of brand names. From Starbuck’s over WaldenBooks to Walmart, the shopping needs covered by this relatively short list are so diverse that one could imagine living at the mall without ever leaving it. And why would you? Mr Romero’s zombies sure seemed to like it…

This cartoon, ‘America the Mall’, was sent in by Josh Bloom, who scanned it from the Boston Globe, in which it appeared in August of 2000 - still very much the heyday of the shopping mall.

238 - Runnin’ Down A Dream: Tom Petty’s Map of LA

Here’s a map reminiscent of the Bruceville map – another piece of musical cartography treated earlier on this blog (entry #134). This one charts the haunts of Tom Petty, an “undercelebrated rock and roll icon”, in the words of LA Weekly, which recently featured this map.

Petty’s been around in LA for over 3 decades, ever since he drove cross-country from Gainesville (FL) to get a record deal for his first band Mudcrutch. Petty’s musical entourage eventually morphed into the Heartbreakers, with whom he achieved success from 1976 onwards – a career that culminated, recently, in a 4,5 hour long Peter Bogdanovich rockumentary on the band, a coffee table book (both entitled Runnin’ Down A Dream)… and, more importantly for this blog, a musical map of Los Angeles.

The map not only shows some of the places relevant to Tom Petty’s life and career, but its tilted presentation and exaggeration of some geographical features paradoxically helps to get a better visual understanding of this sprawling city with the size and population of a not-even-so-small country.

I’m just listing the places on the map to give you an idea what’s where. For the full stories behind each number, go to the article in LA Weekly.

1. Sunset Boulevard; 2. Ben Frank’s Diner (now Mel’s Diner); 3. The Sunset Strip; 4. Shelter Records Office; 5. Hollywood Premiere Motel; 6. Canoga Park; 7. Travelodge Hotel; 8. The Winona; 9. The Alley; 10. Village Recorder; 11. London, U.K.; 12. Whisky A Go Go; 13. Sound City; 14. MCA Records; 15. Century City; 16. “FM radio” and “The freeway”; 17. Cello Studios; 18. The Smog; 19. The 101 Freeway; 20. Mulholland Drive; 21. Reseda; 22. Vampires on Ventura Boulevard; 23. Rose Bowl; 24. East L.A; 25. Viper Room; 26. LAX; 27. Dave Stewart’s house in Encino; 28. Sunset Sound; 29. Cedars-Sinai Medical Center; 30. Universal Amphitheater (now the Gibson); 31. Petty’s home in Encino; 32. Charo’s house in Beverly Hills; 33. Le Seur; 34. Beverly Hills mansion designed by Wallace Neff; 35. Pacific Palisades “Chicken Shack”; 36. House of Blues; 37. McCabe’s Guitar Shop; 38. Malibu.

Click on map to magnify. Many thanks to Kyle Hunsberger, who alerted me to this map.

237 - Regionalism and Religiosity

 

Cuius Regio, Eius Religio - this Latin saying applies to Europe, and to the principle that ended religious warfare: “Whose region (it is), whose religion (shall predominate)”. But it sprang to mind when seeing this map of the US, showing the leading church bodies per county. The map demonstrates the important link between region and religion, or to put it more precisely: where you live is a predictive factor as to where you worship.

The map highlights 8 major Christian denominations, showing where they represent a plurality (and in counties marked with a + at least 50%) of the relevant counties’ population. This shows that there are quite a few remarkably contiguous religious blocks in the US

The most notable of those contiguous areas is that of the Baptists, a term that is quite rightly almost synonymous with Southern Baptist (a bit like how Orthodox in Europe equals Eastern Orthodox; as “western orthodoxy” is referred to as Catholicism). Baptists are the biggest congregations in nigh on all counties of nine states (Oklahoma, Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Kentucky, Tennessee), and are a major presence in West Virginia (where Methodists dominate the northeast), Virginia (where the selfsame Methodists have a foothold in the border area with West Virginia) and Missouri (the area around St Louis being majoritarily Catholic). Florida, Louisiana and Texas are split between a Catholic South and a Baptist North – to a large part due to the large, traditionally Catholic communities of Latinos in southern Texas and Florida and of Cajuns (French-Americans) in Louisiana.

Another block, but not nearly as neatly contiguous, is the Lutheran one, present in the northern Midwest and West, best represented in Minnesota, North and South Dakota, Nebraska, Iowa and Wisconsin. Lutheran here often is synonymous with German-American or more broadly speaking Northern European – again, Lutheran conjures up certain geographical, not to say climatological images; a form of worship designed to survive the grimmest of winters. It would be very hard to rhyme a Latin culture with the Lutheran religion.

I don’t know is there’s a similar link thinkable in the Methodist case. The Methodist areas are also much smaller and much more disparate: in West Virginia (as mentioned) and adjacently in areas of Pennsylvania, Virginia and Ohio. There’s a sprinkling of Methodist-dominated counties in Maryland, Delaware, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska and Kansas. Strangely, most Methodist-dominated counties lie between two parallels of longitude determined by the northern border of Nebraska and Pennsylvania and the southern border of Kansas and Virginia.

The Mormons dominate every county in their state of Utah, and have proceeded from there to become numerically superior in some counties of adjacent states, such as Arizona, Colorado, Idaho and Nevada – they are the biggest congregation in the county that holds Las Vegas.

Most of the other counties have Catholics as the most numerous congregation, leading to a somewhat misleading map. Catholicism very often is the biggest denomination by default, owing to the fact that their institutional unity boosts ‘market share’ but at the same time masks differences between different wings of the Roman church that are as great as between denominations of Protestantism that have separated over theological differences.

On the other side of the bums on pews versus quality of purpose spectrum are the Mennonites (among whom the Amish are the strictest of the strict), dominating in very few counties, but where they do, often in two or three adjacent counties (as in northern Indiana, central Ohio and central Kansas).

Quite puzzling finally is the denomination labelling itself as Christian, dominating in central Illinois and Indiana. I thought they all were. Christian, that is…

This map was sent in many times, but most recently by Jack Alexander. 

236 - Victoria Victorious Over Rest Of Australia

“I used to work in a library and an old gentleman came in with it”, is about as much info as Jayson Emery can offer up about this map that he sent me.

What is obvious nonetheless is that the map is an advertisement of the self-aggrandizing pride taken by inhabitants from the state of Victoria in their constituent part of the Commonwealth of Australia. It is somewhat reminiscent of this map, projecting a similar boastfulness about Texas.

Victoria is Australia’s smallest, but also its most densely populated state. Just over 5 million people live in the state, out of a total of 21 million Australians. Clearly, these 5 million Victorians have some issues with their 16 million compatriots.

This parody map shows Victoria taking over the largest part of the country, pushing all other states to the periphery of the island-continent. Victorians, it appears, hold a lot of records, including ‘World’s most generous people’, ‘World’s best beer’, ‘World’s woolliest sheep’ and even ‘World’s highest taxes’. The other states are markedly less attractive.

Western Australia contains ‘Head hunters’ and is therefore ‘No good for white man’.
The Northern Territory (NT; or Not Teetotal, as it’s called here) holds the ‘World’s savagest crocodiles’ and the ‘World’s biggest mosquitoes’.
Queensland offers ‘Cannibals’, ‘Impenetrable jungle’ and the ‘World’s worst weather’.
South Australia is mainly marked as ‘Desert’ and ‘Unexplored’.
Particularly spiteful is the minuscule rendering of New South Wales, which is marked ‘Incomplete surveys’ and ‘Rabbits only’.

Antagonisms like these translate to other countries, with for example the aforementioned Texan example; other well-known animosities exist between the northern and southern Italians, the English and the Scottish (not to mention the Irish), the Catalans, the Basques and the rest of Spain, etc. All of which proves, quite ironically, that regional chauvinism is quite a universal trait.

235 - A Map to the Tombs of the Stars

I don’t know if the old man was having us on, but he said he was a funerary historian, researching the Père Lachaise cemetery in the same streaming rain that was washing away the lipstick traces off the Oscar Wilde monument and chilling us to the bone. “That little temple,” he said of a remarkably non-derelict house-sized funerary monument, “belongs to a descendant of Count Dracula.

“I’m quite sure you won’t find that relative of Vlad the Impaler on this list – unless under an assumed name; but this is an otherwise comprehensive overview of the most notable occupants of Paris’ biggest and most famous graveyard (although if you’re into that kind of thing and you are in the City of Lights, the cimetière at Montmartre is also worth a visit).

The map numbers the different subsections of Père Lachaise and highlights, in red, its most celebrated occupants – although the celebrity of many has not survived their death by much. Anyone ever heard of Monsieur ou Madame Ferko-Patikarus (65)? Or of Dr E. Reliquet (96)? Some names, however, do still resonate today. How about:
• Héloise and Abélard, the tragic mediaeval lovers, finally together in their very own tombe à deux? (7, near the Jewish section);
• Composers Rossini (4) and Bizet (68);
• The Egyptologist Champollion, the (somewhat disputed) decipherer of the Rosetta Stone (18);
• The illustrator Gustave Doré (22).

As far as I can tell, the map is undated; but it certainly looks like it’s pre-World War II, maybe even pre-World War I. Although Doors-frontman Jim Morrison is buried at Père Lachaise, it’s therefore unlikely he is the Morrison mentioned in section 68.

An intriguing label is that of the Victimes de l’Opéra-comique (96; possibly the last serious attempt at French comedy). Most of the other names are complete mysteries as well; please feel free, if you recognise anyone, to offer some biographical data, which, ultimately, might help in determining the map’s age.

Click on map to enlarge. This map was found here.

234 - “Slumless, Smokeless Cities”

Take that, Harry Beck. Try as you might, the lines on your Tube map could never be as straight as this.

Beck schematised a transportation system that was completely irregularly laid out to begin with. This map, however, shows how planning ahead would enable not just symmetry, but also better living conditions, or as the map itself states: “Slumless, Smokeless Cities”.

The map was drawn up by Sir Ebenezer Howard (1850-1928), the father of the garden city movement. Howard believed the living conditions of the poor, huddled masses cramped together in giant, insalubrious cities could be improved by combining the best aspects of town and country and carefully allocating space to housing, industry and agriculture.

He explained his urban planning ideas in ‘Tomorrow: a Peaceful Path to Real Reform’ (1898), republished as ‘Garden Cities of To-morrow’ in 1902, the year before he would actually found the very first garden city in the world: Letchworth Garden City, in the south of England. In 1920, he would found a second one, Welwyn Garden City, where he single-handedly planted a tree in the garden of each house.

The British garden city movement was important influence on the later strategy of building new towns in the UK, and spawned parallel movements in the US, Canada, Argentina, Israel and Germany.

As with most instances of social engineering, the garden city movement didn’t quite achieve what it set out to do. Its laudable motives and egalitarian vision contrast with the often depressing artificiality of ‘garden cities’, and the fact that they merely function as dormitories to the larger cities they so often adjoin.

This map of a planned, but as yet unbuilt conurbation of ‘slumless, smokeless cities’ has a few notable aspects:

• Central City (pop. 58.000) is the hub for 6 surrounding garden cities (pop. 32.000 each), all given idyllic names such as Philadelphia (’brotherly love’), Rurisville (as in ‘rural’), Justitia, Gladstone (presumably after the Prime Minister), Garden City and Concord.
• Each of these 7 urban centres is surrounded by a canal, which also connects them to the neighbouring and the central cities, forming a wheel-shaped system of waterways, the Inter Municipal Canal.
• A slightly smaller circle is formed by the Inter Municipal Railway. Within this circle lie several curious institutions: ‘Homes for Waifs’ (one imagines a neighbourhood populated by petite, sulking catwalk beauties), ‘Epileptic Farms’ (must be annoying for the cows when they’re being milked), ‘Large Farms’, an ‘Insane Asylum’ and a ‘Home for Inebriates’.
• Outside the circular railway, indeed outside the circular canal, are ‘Convalescent Homes’, ‘Stone Quarries’, ‘Cemetery’, a ‘College for the Blind’ and ‘Industrial Homes’.
• Although all basically the same shape (a circle divided into four equal parts by the intersecting waterways), each of the satellite cities has a different lay-out, allowing for variation (so those inebriates aren’t unduly confused on their way home).

This map was provided to me by Arjan Daniels.

233 - The Dutch Moisturize Mars

The pessimist mourns the glass’s half-emptiness, the optimist rejoices that it’s semi-full and the engineer just thinks the glass is twice the size it should be. I wonder what a space engineer would think of this map of Mars, half underwater.

Although the latest scientific evidence seems to indicate there once was water on Mars - laying to rest a controversy that has raged ever since ‘canals’ were detected on its surface – The Red Planet nowadays is rather rocky and definitely dusty, and not even close to moist. To map Mars as if it’s covered with oceans, seas and bays is clearly too Terra-centric.

It might help to know that this map of of a semi-submerged Mars is of Dutch origin. As the Dutch have always struggled to keep their country above sea-level, they might find it impossible to imagine a world without encroaching seas. This map therefore may say less about the precarious environment of Mars than about that of the Netherlands itself, a country not coincidentally named for its disadvantageous position vis-à-vis the North Sea.

None of which explains, however, why this vision of Mars would be upside down, with the Zuidpool (South Pole) at the top and the Noordpool (North Pole) at the bottom of the map. Maybe Dutch engineering isn’t what it used to be.

The map shows several continents protruding from the Martian waves. In the southern (top) hemisphere, these are:
• Gillland (which has far too many l’s in its name for a continent on any planet; and seeing its coast is a dotted line, probably is an ice-island)
• Burchardtland
• Cassiniland
• Lockyerland
• Jacobland
• Keplerland
• Webbland
• Huygensland (ostensibly the biggest continent, extending way down north)

In the northern (bottom) hemisphere, the continents are:
• Fontanaland
• Herschelland
• Dawesland
• Mädlerland
• Rosseland (a protrusion from the polar ice in the north)

From the few names I recognise, the continents seem to be named after astronomers (Keppler, Huyghens, Cassini, Herschel). I’m unsure whether the same applies for the bodies of water, these ones on the western (or is that eastern, since it’s upside down; in any case, the left) hemisphere:
• Maraldi Sea
• Huggins Bay
• Hook Sea
• Zöllner Sea
• Beer Sea
• Lambert Sea
• Newton Strait
• Arago Strait
• Herschell Strait
• Dawes Ocean
• Kaiser Sea

On the other hemisphere, there are:
• De la Rue Ocean
• De la Rue Strait
• Dawes Sea
• Maunder Sea
• Ariy Sea
• Faye Sea
• Tycho Sea

Apart from Isaac Newton and Tycho Brahe (the Danish astronomer with the bronze nose) and names previously used for the continents, I don’t recognise anyone. The tropics are called tropic of Lion (Leeuwskeerkring) and tropic of Aquarius (Watermanskeerkring).

This map, unfortunately undated and unsourced, was taken from the Agile Rabbit Book of Historical and Curious Maps.

232 - Willkommen in Neu-York (?)

One could call it cautionary cartography, this map of a thoroughly germanified New York – something that might have happened in an alternate universe, where the Nazis not only won the World War in Europe, but managed to cross the ocean and subdue the United States.

Neu-York is a project by artist Melissa Gould, who writes on the project’s website about its disorienting side-effects, beyond the obvious “horrifying counterfactual proposition”: “(this) is an exploration of psychological transport, place, displacement and memory. This re-imagining of the city plays with comparison and misrecognition, exploring the coexistence of past and present, fiction and reality.”

Gould’s Neu-York is based on several pre-1940 maps of Manhattan, thus excluding post-war developments, and digitally manipulating the material – erasing the synagogues, for one. Street and location names were replaced by names taken from contemporary Berlin maps. Thus, this Manhattan isn’t so much a city conquered and renamed, but one transported across an ocean and transposed on another one – Berlin-am-Hudson, so to speak.

The artist chose methods and colours to give her work a ‘vintage’ feel, resulting in an uncanny, pseudo-historical piece of psycho-geography.

• The project’s website shows 21 detailed maps of Neu-York
• Also, extensive bi-lingual listings of the renamed streets, sights and locations. Some of the renaming is problematic: why does Central Park become Tiergarten when it obviously isn’t a zoo? Others are plain unsettling: the Croton Reservoir in Central Park becomes Wannsee, a Berlin locale forever infamously linked with the conference held there to set up the Endlösung, the extermination of European Jewry.
• The avenues are all named after German kings and emperors.
• The streets are named, in clusters, for birds, wildflowers, plants, grains and herbs, flowers, trees, animals, German composers, operas, ancient German first names, foreign cities, German rivers and German cities. More info on the renaming on the website.

Thanks to Melissa Gould and Larry Sawh for alerting me to this project.

231 - Praise the Lord and Pass the Dictionary!

This delicious map is the Europa Polyglotta, published in 1730 by Gottfried Hensel (or Henselius, after the contemporary fasion of latinising surnames). I’ve managed to piece together only very little information on its origin and background because I found it on a Ukranian website, describing it in an alphabet (not to mention language) I don’t understand.

Which is ironic because the full Latin title of the map is: Europa Polyglotta, Linguarum Genealogiam exhibens, una cum Literis, Scribendique modis, Omnium Gentium. Which I can translate, sort of: ‘Multilingual Europe, showing the genealogy of the languages, together with the alphabets and modes of writing of all peoples’.

In the upper left corner, the map shows severfal alphabets (left to right):
• “the Scythians, born of the Hebrews”
• the Greeks
• the Marcomanni
• Runes
• Moeso-Gothic
• Picto-Hibernic

In the upper right corner are shown Characteri Rutenicae Linguae, i.e. the Russian alphabet.

The lower left corner shows following alphabets next to each other (left to right):
• Latin
• German
• Anglo-Saxon

At the bottom, there are several other alphabets of the
• Hunnish,
• Slavonic (Cyrillic),
• Glagolitic (Illyric) and
• Etruscan (Eugubina) languages.

The map itself attempts to show the concordances and differences between all the languages spoken in Europe by spelling out the beginning of the Lord’s Prayer in each of them.

Some notable facts about this ethnolinguistic map of Europe.
• The language areas have remained remarkably stable, except where German has lost terrain in Eastern Europe (in itself a relatively recent occurrence, and solely due to the Second World War).
• Another area that has disappeared, though is the Arabic (or Berber) portion of Iberia – the Spanish completed their Reconquista in 1492, was ‘Mauritanian’ still spoken there almost 250 years later?
• Turkish is mentioned in what is now Bulgaria, still home to a sizable Turkish minority. But no Bulgarian at that time?
• Apparently, ‘Barbarian Greek’ was still spoken in Asia Minor in the mid-18th century.
• Tartaria is subscribed with the legend Vocibus Teutonicis et Sclavonicis mixta – ‘With mixed German and Slavic languages’. I don’t believe that could have corresponded with the reality of that time.

It would be interesting to hear from native speakers how much their version of the prayer has deviated from this mid-18th century form.

Click on the map to maximise; map found here.

230 - Papua New Guinea, the Linguistic Superpower

The book Limits of Language by Swedish linguist Mikael Parkvall is a sort of languages-only Guinness Book of Records, listing everything that’s large, small and otherwise interesting about the manifold manners of human speech and associated forms of communication. One item deals with the world’s most linguistically diverse countries, and is illustrated with this map, of the world’s ‘linguistic superpowers’. The caption reads:

“Languages are very unevenly distributed among the countries of the world. The map tries to capture this fact by rendering each country in a size corresponding to the number of languages spoken in it. (Because of the inherent problems in accomplishing this, sizes are rather approximate). The ten shaded countries are those in which more than 200 languages are in use.”

The Ethnologue, cited a bit further, only lists 9 countries with more than 200 languages, however. Here are the 12 top countries:

Papua New Guinea 823 languages
Indonesia 726
Nigeria 505
India 387
Mexico 288
Cameroon 279
Australia 235
DR Congo 218
China 201
Brazil 192
United States 176
Philippines 169

It’s curious how the linguistically most diverse country in the world is Papua New Guinea – because it’s also the place with the biggest biodiversity anywhere, one of the last places in the world where new species get discovered regularly. I wonder whether there’s a single explanation for both phenomena.

I was alerted to this map by Bjørn A. Bojesen; Mr Parkvall himself was kind enough to provide me with this map. Here’s a link to his book on Amazon, warmly recommended for anyone both language- and trivia-obsessed.

229 - Vital Statistics of a Deadly Campaign: the Minard Map

“The best statistical graphic ever drawn“, is how statistician Edward Tufte described this chart in his authoritative work ‘The Visual Display of Quantitative Information’.

The chart, or statistical graphic, is also a map. And a strange one at that. It depicts the advance into (1812) and retreat from (1813) Russia by Napoleon’s Grande Armée, which was decimated by a combination of the Russian winter, the Russian army and its scorched-earth tactics. To my knowledge, this is the origin of the term ’scorched earth’ – the retreating Russians burnt anything that might feed or shelter the French, thereby severely weakening Napoleon’s army.

As a statistical chart, the map unites six different sets of data.
• Geography: rivers, cities and battles are named and placed according to their occurrence on a regular map.
• The army’s course: the path’s flow follows the way in and out that Napoleon followed.
• The army’s direction: indicated by the colour of the path, gold leading into Russia, black leading out of it.
• The number of soldiers remaining: the path gets successively narrower, a plain reminder of the campaigns human toll, as each millimetre represents 10.000 men.
• Temperature: the freezing cold of the Russian winter on the return trip is indicated at the bottom, in the republican measurement of degrees of réaumur (water freezes at 0° réaumur, boils at 80° réaumur).
• Time: in relation to the temperature indicated at the bottom, from right to left, starting 24 October (pluie, i.e. ‘rain’) to 7 December (-27°).

Pause a moment to ponder the horrific human cost represented by this map: Napoleon entered Russia with 442.000 men, took Moscow with only 100.000 men left, wandered around its abandoned ruins for some time and escaped the East’s wintry clutches with barely 10.000 shivering soldiers. Those include 6.000 rejoining the ‘bulk’ of the army from up north. Napoleon never recovered from this blow, and would be decisively beaten at Waterloo under two years later.

Almost exactly a century and three decades later, Hitler would repeat Napoleon’s mistake by again underestimating the vastness of Russia, the inhospitability of its winters and the determination of the Russians.

The Economist, which in its last issue of 2007 published a story on the way in which some charts succesfully visualise statistical data (yes, those editorial meetings must be a riot), pointed out that “As men tried, and mostly failed to cross the Berezina river under heavy attack, the width of the black line halves: another 20,000 or so gone. The French now use the expression C’est la Bérézina to describe a total disaster.”

The map was the work of Charles Joseph Minard (1781-1870), a French civil engineer who was an inspector-general of bridges and roads, but whose most remembered legacy is in the field of statistical graphics, producing this and other maps in his retirement. This is a translation of the legend at the top of the map:

Figurative chart of the successive losses in men by the French army in the Russian campaign 1812-1813. Drawn up by Mr Minard, inspector-general of bridges and roads (retired). Paris, 20 November 1869.
The number of men present is symbolised by the broadness of the coloured zones at a rate of one millimetre for ten thousand men; furthermore, those numbers are written across the zones. The red signifies the men who entered Russia, the black those who got out of it.
The data used to draw up this chart were found in the works of Messrs. Thiers, de Ségur, de Fezensac, de Chambray and the unpublished journal of Jacob, pharmacist of the French army since 28 October. To better represent the diminution of the army, I’ve pretended that the army corps of Prince Jerôme and of Marshall Davousz which were detached at Minsk and Mobilow and rejoined the main force at Orscha and Witebsk, had always marched together with the army.

Jas Ellis sent me this link to the aforementioned Economist article, which enumerates and shows several other interesting infographics. It also has the clearest, most detailed reproduction of the Minard map I’ve ever seen; the map had been suggested to me previously by several readers, among whom Brian Westley, M. Kranz and Stephen Eckett.

Click on the map for a full-sized view.

228 - Merry Kiritimati!

There are three Christmas Islands in the world. One is a small community on mainland Nova Scotia (Canada) named after a nearby island, which is presently called Ghost Island but at some point was named after its sole occupant, a native man whose surname was Christmas.

Another is a 135 sq. km (52 sq. mi.) Australian island territory in the Indian Ocean, closer to Jakarta than to Perth and home to about 1.500 people (Chinese 70%, European 20%, Malay 10%). Two thirds of the island is a National Park, containing many flora and fauna species unique to the island. It was named by captain William Mynors of the Royal Mary on Christmas Day 1643. Discovery of huge phosphate reserves led to annexation by the British in 1888, settlement and mining from the 1890s onwards. The UK transferred sovereignty to Australia in 1957. Phosphate mining (closed in 1987, reopened in 1991) remains the main economic activity.

The most interesting of the three, I think, is the Pacific island of Kiritimati. This is the pronunciation of Christmas in the local language, Gilbertese, which is why it is not often recognised as the ‘other’ Christmas island (the more famous one being the aforementioned Australian-governed island). Here’s a quick overview:

• With a surface of 642 sq. km (248 sq. mi), the Pacific island of Kiritimati is the largest coral atoll in the world. It comprises 70% of the total land area of the republic of Kiribati, made up of 33 atolls in total.
• The island was named by captain James Cook, who discovered it on December 24, 1777.
• The island has a population of 5.115 inhabitants (2005 census), concentrated in four villages: London (1.829), Tabwakea (1.881), Banana (1.170) and Poland (235). A fifth settlement, Paris, is abandoned.
• Most places were named by French priest Emmanuel Rougier, who leased the island from 1917 to 1939 and planted 800.000 coconut trees there.
• In the early 1950s, Wernher von Braun proposed the island as a launch site for manned spacecraft.
• In May 1957, the British military executed Operation Grapple – the first test of their H-bomb. The Americans conducted a similar Operation Dominic here in 1962.
• The Japanese operate a satellite tracking station on Kiritimati, and at one time scouted the island as a landing location for their space shuttle HOPE-X (a project they now have abandoned).
• Apart from being named after the winterval known as Christmas, Kiritimati has another claim to end-of-year festive season fame: it’s located so close to the International Date Line (and on the right side of it, too) that it’s the first inhabited place on Earth to experience New Year.
• The eastern shore of the island curves to form the Bay of Wrecks, possibly a reference to how people feel the morning after a Christmas or New Year’s Party.

This map was provided by Toon Wassenberg, who sent this link to Christmas Island by way of season’s greetings; the link contains several maps of the Australian Christmas Island, and this one of its Pacific cousin.

227 - First the Cartoon, then the War: Europe in 1870

All was not well in Europe in 1870, the year the Franco-Prussian war would lead to a united German Empire and a humiliated France; one could call it the first of three European civil wars, the other two being World Wars One and Two.

This French satirical cartoon map (’Carte drôlatique d’Europe pour 1870‘) sought to get some laughs out of those tensions by showing an anthropomorphic map of Europe, where each country was represented by a caricature of its national ‘persona’.
• Prussia, made to look like its walrus-bearded ‘Iron Chancellor’ Otto von Bismarck, is haranguing its neighbours: kneeling on Austria, a sleeping soldier in undress; covering the Netherlands with its right hand.
• France, dressed as a fierce zouave soldier, is aiming a bayonet at the heart of the unwieldy Prussian military monster.
• Belgium, too small to be anthropomorphised, is being squeezed between France and Prussia (which would become its familiar, if uncomfortable lot in the First and Second World Wars).
• England is an old woman, struggling with Ireland, her rebellious lapdog on a leash (although it looks more like a small bear); Scotland is the old lady’s mobcap.
• Spain is a rotund senorita, smoking the day away while lying on her back and thus nearly crushing the small Portuguese soldier under her.
• Corsica and Sardinia are joined to show a leprechaun-like figure gleefully mooning the map-reader.
• Italy, possibly made to look like the great national leader Garibaldi, is holding off pressure from Prussia.
• Denmark is a small, swaggering soldier, no doubt hoping to recover Holstein, the territory it lost to Prussia in a war a few years earlier.
• Norway and Sweden are together turned into a ferocious dog.
• Switzerland is a closed cottage.
• Turkey in Europe is “an Oriental crushed by the superincumbent pressure of the other countries”.
• Turkey in Asia is a girl smoking a hookah pipe.
• Russia is a rag-collector in a patched coat, ‘Crimea’ written on the patch sewn on last.

The Degrees of Longitude at the bottom of the map are measured in rifle-lenghts – another comment on the explosive military situation.

This map was obviously drawn before the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian war in July. Its author is mentioned as Hadol; Paul Hadol was a French illustrator and caricaturist, also publishing under the pseudonym ‘White’. He was one of the exponents of France’s Golden Age of Caricaturism in the mid-19th century.

In a sad irony, seeing that war was so imminent, most Europeans were able to agree that this was a funny map. It was republished in Germany, Great Britain and the Netherlands.

A link to this map was sent to me by Marc da Costa, who found it at Bibliodyssey, a delightful blog now condensed into a delicious book. I usually don’t plug products, but having bought the eponymous book myself, I can vouch for its amazingness. There’s a link to it on the blog itself.

226 - Geo-Poetry, or: Finding Wordsworth

Five years have past; five summers, with the length
Of five long winters! And again I hear
These waters, rolling from their mountain-springs
With a soft inland murmur (…)

So begins one of the Lyrical Ballads, a collaboration between the English romantic poets Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth, published in 1798. Together with ‘I Wandered Lonely As A Cloud’, it’s one of Wordsworth’s most famous poems. It’s often referred to as ‘Tintern Abbey’, the ruin of a mediaeval monastery on the Welsh-English border that inspired it, but its actual, longer name is ‘Lines Composed A Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey, on Revisiting the Banks on the Wye during a Tour. July 13, 1798′.

Since air travel was out of the question in that period, Wordsworth obviously meant a few miles up- or downstream from the then ivy-covered magnet for proto-tourists, who flocked to the ruins for their ‘romantic’ (today we might equally say ‘gothic’) thrill.

This map, found here, shows exactly where Wordsworth might have penned the poem. If someone bothered to measure the exact distance, the poem could be renamed ‘Lines Composed 8.2 Miles Up the River from Tintern Abbey’… but that would no doubt detract from the work’s poetic quality. ‘I Wandered Lonely As a Stratocumulus’, anyone?

225 - Chicago’s 91 Hoods

Not many people know that the epithet Windy City was bestowed on Chicago not for meteorological but political reasons – apparently, Chicago politicians at one time were known for the windiness of their speeches. Its Latin motto – Urbs in horto; the city in the garden – reflects its spaciousness, as it sprawls out in all directions save that of Lake Michigan, on the shore of which it was founded.

Another nickname, the Second City, belies the fact that it is now the third-largest US city, after New York and Los Angeles, with almost 3 million in Chicago proper and almost 10 million in its metro area, dubbed ‘Chicagoland’. The Indian term at the origin of the city’s name, shikaakwa, means ’striped skunk’, by the way.

Neighbourhood-wise, the branches of the Chicago River divide the city in North, West and South Side. Sociologists have further divided the city in anything from 77 up to over 200 different neighbourhoods. This map chops up Chicago into 91 ‘hoods, which obviously leaves out many of the 200-plus in the most detailed overview. But the typography, whereby the name of each ‘hood fills out its assigned space as fully as possible, is pretty cool nevertheless.

This map was suggested to me by Jez Robinson, who found it here at orkposters, who designed (and sell) the map.

224 - The Tree of Life Down the Tube

Madonna should love this map, having both gone all British and jewish-mystical. This map, in the style of the London Underground(*), depicts the Kaballah Tree of Life.

Sephiroth (Hebrew for ‘Enumerations’) is the name for the ten attributes of God in the Kabbalah (a form of jewish esotericism). Ten in itself is of course also a significant number, as it is divinely perfect. The attributes are:

* The Crown (’Keter’ in Hebrew): the Creator Himself.
* Wisdom (’Hokhmah’): Divine reality/revelation; the power of Wisdom.
* Understanding (’Binah’): repentance/reason; the power of Love.
* Mercy (’Hesed’): grace/intention to emulate God; the power of Vision.
* Strength (’Gevurah’): judgment/determination; the power of Intention.
* Beauty (’Tif’eret’): symmetry/compassion; the power of Creativity.
* Victory (’Netzah’): contemplation/initiative/persistence; the power of the Eternal Now.
* Splendour (’Hod’): surrender/sincerity/steadfastness; the power of Observation.
* Yesod (’Foundation’): remembering/knowing; the power of Manifesting.
* Kingdom (’Malkuth’): physical presence/vision and illusion; the power of Healing.

As befits esoteric systems, the aforementioned terms are anything but elucidating, and furthermore they’re only one of many interpretations of the 10 sephiroth (rabbi Moses ben Jacob Cordovero’s, to be precise).

These 10 sephiroth are arranged in 3 columns, the middle of which is headed by the Crown and is known as the ‘Pillar of Mildness’, the right one topped by Wisdom is called the ‘Pillar of Mercy’, and the left one overseen by Understanding and known as the ‘Pillar of Severity’.

The 22 lines connecting the 10 sephiroth correspond with the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet. Twenty-two plus ten equals 32, which (of course) refers to the number of Masonic degrees, the number of Kabbalistic paths to wisdom and the number of teeth in an adult’s mouth!

If all this sounds like mumbo-jumbo not unlike the sort you would hear from Madame Soleil-type soothsayers, that’s no coincidence. Occultists have connected the hermetism of the Kabbalah with the Tarot. The sephirothic tree of life has even been thought to symbolize the prototypical ‘Heavenly Man’.

I don’t know enough about esoteric card tricks to state beyond the shadow of a doubt that the stations in between the 10 main ones correspond with categories from Tarot, but I’m pretty sure they do.

This map was sent to me by Jamie M.A. Smith, who first saw it in Alan Moore’s comic book series Promethea.

(*) Not, as Kevin Kline’s character presumes in ‘A Fish Called Wanda’, some sort of resistance movement.

223 - Marzipan Europe

Candy isn’t usually applied to make political or geographical statements, but in this case marzipan, one of the more malleable confectioneries, has been transformed into a map of the European Union (of the EU25 period, before the accession of Bulgaria and Romania). This must have been done without a real map of Europe close by; if you can normally picture the continent as an abstract figure marching west (thanks to Italy’s boot), then this is a drunk abstract figure staggering towards the Atlantic.

The map was sent in by Michael Schrauzer and can be found here, quite aptly, in the Wikipedia entry for marzipan.

222 - Birthplaces of Mississippi Blues Artists

 Mississippi is the poorest of all states, but fortunately also has a happier distinction: it’s the place where most of the quintessentially American music genres originated, from blues and jazz to rock ‘n roll.An amazing accomplishment for a state that has under three million inhabitants, but it’s wirth noting that most of the musical history of these genres was written by Mississippians outside of their native state. This is due to the Great Migration following the railroads north to Chicago, an exodus that continued throughout the first half of the 20th century.This mainly black exodus was caused as much by plummeting cotton prices as by the contiuned disenfranchisement of former slaves. It resulted in Chicago’s status as the capital of jazzs and blues muesic (and Detroit as a major centre for soul).This blues map gives an idea where many of the blues greats originated - as well as which instrments they played, and if and when they migrated north. There is an interesting concentration of talent originating in and around Jackson, the state’s capital, but Clarksdale is also an important centre. It’s probably no coincidence that Clarksdale is the location of the Delta Blues Muesum - and, allegedly, of the crossroads where Robert Johnson sold his soul to the Devil in exchange for his musical talent.A complete listing of the artists referenced in this map (and of course the map itself, which was designed by David Michael Miller) can be found here on Miller’s website Front Page Graphics. The site also has another map on the history of African-American music: Jazz and R’nB Landmarks of Downtown New Orleans.

221 - Greater China - Made in Taiwan

  The Chinese nationalist party Kuomintang that was defeated when Mao Zedong’s communists triumphantly took control of China in 1949, retreated to Taiwan, a small island off the coast of mainland China, roughly halfway between Hong Kong and Shanghai. Almost 60 years later, the Taiwanese government still maintains it is the rightful government for all of China, and the official name of the state is not Taiwan, but Republic of China (RoC). 

 

Over the years, this has become an increasingly hollow fiction, with most UN members having switched recognition to the mainland government, the People’s Republic of China (PRC). This leaves Taiwan - not even a member of the United Nations - in a sort of existential limbo. Concurrently, the animus for declaring independence is growing in Taiwan – a move strongly discouraged by the communist government in Beijing, who are also keen to maintain the fiction of territorial unity between the island and the mainland… with of course their government the rightful one, also on Taiwan. 

 

The length and breadth of that fiction can’t be illustrated any better than by this map, detailing the territorial claims of the RoC on the mainland. These revanchist claims are truly spectacular: not only do they include all the area presently under the control of the communist regime, but also many outlying areas controlled by China’s neighbours. The uproar over these claims would be much greater if Taiwan were in a position to actually (re)take these areas:

• The whole of Mongolia, now an independent republic;
• The Russian autonomous republic of Tannu-Tuva, called tannu Uriankhai by the RoC;
• A large part of Tajikistan, namely most of its autonomous province of Gorno-Badakhshan;
• A tiny sliver of Afghanistan’s Pamir corridor;
• Small areas of northern Pakistan and areas claimed by India;
• The eastern part of the tiny Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan;
• Parts of the Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh;
• Parts of northern Myanmar (Birma);
• And a small piece of Russian-administered territory on China’s northeastern border.

In all, the RoC claims territory from no less than ten countries, including of course all the territory of its nemesis, the PRC. The sovereignty fiction is completed by labelling the area under Taipei’s control (Taiwan, but also some smaller islands – some quite close to the mainland) the ‘free area of the Republic of China’, Taipei its ‘Provisional capital’ and Nanking (on the mainland) its ‘Official capital’. 

 

Special mention should be made of the Diaoyu islands (Senkaku islands in Japanese), which are claimed both by the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and by the Republic of China (RoC) but are in fact administered by Japan, proving the old dictum that when two dogs fight over a bone, it’s often the third dog that runs off with it.

 

This map, to  be found here on wikipedia, was sent in by John Halton, who comments: “From what I understand, the RoC can’t actually drop these claims, however unrealistic they may now be. To do so would be interpreted by the PRC as tantamount to a declaration of independence, which the PRC would regard as an act of war.”

220 - Russo-Japanese War Cartoons

This is interesting: these cartoons obviously are about the Russo-Japanese War of 1905. But since I’m offline while writing this, I can’t find out much more of the context. So let’s see what I can extrapolate.

First, the facts – as far as I know them. The by now rather obscure Russo-Japanese War of 1905 was a relatively minor, mainly naval conflict that nevertheless echoed around the world: it was the first time in modern history that a non-European nation defeated a European one.

Over the centuries, Russia had expanded from its heartland to the west of the Urals into Siberia, eventually reaching the Pacific shores of the Far East. At the turn of the 20th century, these sparsely populated parts to the north of China and Japan were also outside the orbit of these two empires, the former ancient but impotent, the latter only just emerging from centuries of self-imposed isolation.

What exactly caused the war I don’t remember, but it centred on Russia’s possession of Port Arthur, a coastal city somewhere in the vicinity of the Korean peninsula. Japan, swiftly modernising by copying various bits of European civilisation – up to the Prussian cut of its school uniforms – disputed Russia’s push into its backyard and used its brand spanking new European-style navy to inflict a defeat on the Russians.

This shock was felt first and foremost in Russia itself, where the defeat at the hands of the Japanese contributed to the failed revolution of 1905, a dress rehearsal for the communist takeover of 1917. These cartoons, obviously mocking the Russian defeat, were not made in Russia itself – understandably, as the Czars were wont to send people too critical of their rule on a one-way trip to Siberia.

• The first cartoon is in French, and was tirée à 30 exemplaires (which is an extremely small figure for what should be a mass medium, one would think). It shows a bearded, booted Russian (a cossack, but possibly the Czar himself) lying on the ground asleep and overrun, Gulliver-like, by tiny soldiers marching up the Korean peninsula – Korea was a Japanese colony at the time, I think. The presumably Japanese war ships in the Sea of Japan (Mer du Japon) seem to underline the naval aspect of the Japanese victory. Two paper boats with a sailor each might symbolise European powers observing the Japanese victory. An English soldier on the left, probably at or near Hong Kong and another colonial standing behind a (the?) Chinese wall do the same.
• The Gulliver-theme is repeated in the second cartoon, also French. I’m not sure what le petit poucet means. Port Arthur is mentioned by name. A group of tiny solders watch as one of their number attempts to de-boot the sleeping Russian. The implication is that Russia’s defeat is due to its unpreparedness.
• The third cartoon shows a small pond in which a Japanese ship sinks a Russian one. The large, looming Russian is unable to hide his displeasure, while the smaller Japanese can’t hide his glee. Oh, what a surprise, reads the caption. No Gulliver theme here, but the Japanese figure is again a lot smaller than the European one.

Is this an indication of racism? One could think that by portraying ‘orientals’ as small and in large groups, this indicates that they are less ‘individual’, less ‘human’ than Europeans. Or maybe the smaller stature simply reflects the David-like character of the Japanese victory over the Russian Goliath.

I came across these cartoons a while ago, and can’t recall exactly where I found them.

219 - Found: a Map of the Island in ‘Lost’

Lost is not only the title of a popular American tv series, it also describes the exasperated feeling of those viewers looking for a semblance of a plot in the series. The broad outline goes something like this: The survivors of a crashed jumbo jet on a transpacific flight find themselves stranded on a tropical island, cut off from the civilised world and left to fend for themselves.

But that is where the similarities with Robinson Crusoë’s adventures end. They would be too tedious for today’s viewing audiences, used to shows that are fast-paced and action-packed. For example: Crusoë spent two whole years in hiding when he saw another person’s footsteps on his island. Imagine turning that into prime time tv fare.

Thus, we are provided with a dizzying array of mysteries wrapped in riddles, well hidden inside several family-sized enigmas, including but not limited to: the hatch, the Dharma Initiative and the ‘Others’. These are all somehow connected to each other, although it’s never quite clear how everything fits together. As if that is not disorienting enough, there are visions, dreams, flash backs and the occasional flash forward to ostensibly illuminate but actually obfuscate the progress of what for lack of a better definition we shall call the progression of the story.

So what do you do when you are lost in Lost? You draw a map, of course. This one places several elements of the series in an arrangement that looks like it’s designed to be a memory aide for the bewildered viewer.

The map does not resolve the one thing that has always bugged me most about the series: if you would spend all that time on an island, wouldn’t you give it a name? Every other island on the planet has one. Why not this one?

This map was sent in by Loirogato Gostoso, who refers to a Cleonir Maram as its publisher.

218 - Korea’s Dark Half

North and South Korea have been separated at the 38th parallel ever since the Korean War (1950-1953), which has never officially ended. In the ensuing ‘ceasefire’, North Korea developed into a communist dictatorship with a centrally planned economy, while South Korea became a capitalist democracy with a free market economy.

Economic hardship in the officially ‘self-reliant’ North has led to mass starvation, while the South has a vibrant economy able to compete with the best of the world. In 1996, the per capita GNP in the North was $920, while it was $11.270 in the South. A 1999 estimate of per capita GNPs put the South’s at 13 times that of the North. More recent figures will probably show an even wider gap.

Due to the different economic results on either side of the Demilitarized Zone, the ethnically quite homogenous Koreans have even begun to diversify physically, with the average North Korean male almost 7 cm shorter than his Southern counterpart (165,6 cm vs. 172,5 cm). North Korean females are on average 4 cm shorter than Southern women (154,9 cm vs. 159,1 cm). By 2025, the height difference is projected to increase to 11 cm for men, 6 cm for women. Unless the North’s economic situation changes drastically, that is.

So the South dwarfs the North, not just numerically (50 vs. 27 million), but also economically and even size-wise. Another stark reminder of the different worlds both Koreas now inhabit, is this map, a picture of the night-time illumination on the Korean peninsula.

The metropolitan area of Seoul, the South’s capital, holds 23 million people and is the second-largest conurbation on the planet (after Tokyo). Its huge lit-up area, close to the border with the North, is clearly visible from space. Other Southern cities, while quite a lot smaller than Seoul, are also clearly distinguishable on this satellite map, for example Gunsan on the western coast, directly below it the inland city of Gwangju, the cities of Masan and Busan on the southern coast, and several other cities, much smaller still.

By contrast (quite literally, even), the only speck of light north of the DMZ is the North’s capital of Pyonyang, a single, neat pinprick of white punched through an otherwise completely black canvas. The minimal lighting belies the fact that Pyongyang is home to an estimated 3 million people. Gunsan, in the South, has under 300.000 inhabitants.

There is only one bright side to this darkness that I can think of: North Korea must be a fantastic place for stargazing…

This map was sent in by Isak Asgeirsson, who found it here at Imageshack.

217 - East of Eden

According to Genesis 4:16 (KJV), “Cain went out from the presence of the LORD and dwelt in the land of Nod, on the east of Eden.” According to this map, that land of Nod might have been Sicily, which then was a land bridge between Italy and North Africa.

 

The author of this map maintains that:

 

• “Eden was a city and exists today as the city of Oudna in the nation of Tunisia.
• “Ararat was a city and exists today as the city Arwad on the coast of t he nation of Syria.”
• “The Great Flood occurred where and when an isthmus, which existed between the Apennine mountains of Europe and the Atlas mountains of Africa, collapsed and sank.”

This map of the antediluvian world was sent to me by Mr Patrick Archer, the author of this map. He did not provide any more context for his theories. Which is regrettable, as I would have liked to know why he places Ararat on the Syrian coast, and doesn’t equate it, as is more generally accepted, with the eponymous mountain in eastern Turkey.

And why the breached isthmus he refers to is near Sicily and not, as is generally accepted, near Gibraltar, where the Mediterranean Sea meets the Atlantic Ocean. I’m not enough of a bible scholar to know where Eden is supposed to have been, but I’m sure most experts would place it somewhere in the Fertile Crescent, in or near present-day Iraq.

216 - US Annexes Amazon Forest!

 

“Geographical manuals in US schools show an amputated Brazil, without the Amazon and the Pantanal. This is how students are taught that these are ‘international’ areas, in other words: this is how the North American public is prepared for the ‘internationalisation’ of these areas.”

“The following text is taken from a US high school geography manual, signalling the United States (jointly with the United Nations) can take over the Amazon to protect the water and air quality of the world.”

“The manual discusses how this area is in South America, a region with the worst poverty on the planet and divided among eight nations with a weird, irresponsible, cruel and authoritarian population – savages, drugs dealers, illiterates, etc… It is these peoples that could cause the death and destruction of the world, in a mere few years’ time.”

“Going into detail, page 76 of the manual ‘Introduction to Geography’ by David Norman (used at junior high school level), describes ‘Operation Columbia’:”

“North American troops (80.000 strong in Surinam and Guyana) will take over Brazilian airspace and launch rockets from Alcantara. The US will open a CIA office at the Foz de Iguazu tripoint (Argentina/Paraguay/Brazil) and implant two military bases in Argentina – one in Patagonia and one closer to Buenos Aires.”

“Legend below the map: ‘Here we see the International Reserve, consisting of territory of eight South American countries: Brazil, Bolivia, Peru, Colombia, Venezuela, Guyana, Surinam, French Guyana… Some of the most miserable countries of the world.”

“Since the middle of the 1980s, the most important nature area in the world became the responsibility of the US and the UN. The fund that was set up for this purpose is FIRAF (the ‘First International Reserve of the Amazon Forestal Fund’). This foundation has taken responsibility for the Amazon region, located in South America, a region among the poorest in the world and ruled by irresponsible, cruel and authoritarian governments. The area is part of eight different countries, the populations of which consist of violent types, drugs traffickers and ignorants, illiterates and primitives.”

“The foundation of FIRAF was approved and supported by the nations of the G-23 and it is a genuine challenge to our country and a gift to the whole world, as the ownership of this valuable global asset was in the hands of primitive peoples and countries without responsibility for these ‘lungs of the world’, which under their stewardship would disappear in a few years’ time.”

“We can say that this region has the greatest biodiversity on the planet, both in animal and plant species. The value of this region is incalculable, but the Earth can rest assured that the USA will not allow the Latin American countries to further exploit and destroy this heritage of all mankind. The FIRAF will be administered as any other US National Park, with strict rules regarding exploitation.”

“Please send this mail onto as many people as possible, to inform all of these insidious plans. Gracias, obrigado, thank you!”

This is the verbatim transcription of a rambling, repetitive chain mail (often but not always in Spanish or Portuguese) purporting to show a US scheme for taking over the Amazon basin, under the pretext of saving its globally vital resources from the clutches of the savage locals. It’s not hard to find some things wrong with it.

 

•  Why would the US cooperate with the UN, or vice  versa? Both entities are more often at odds with one another than not. Furthermore, any such action would have to be approved by the UN Security Council; it’s inconceivable how other veto-wielding members would permit it, especially the increasingly uncooperative Russians, or the Chinese, who no doubt have their own agenda in the region.
•  The quoted texts seem hardly appropriate for a school textbook, which are in most cases formulated in neutral tones, even in America… Unless this is an illustration of American arrogance as imagined by outsiders.
• Why would the CIA open an office at said tripoint, and why would the US implant military bases so far from their area of annexation?
•  The G-23 doesn’t seem to exist, or if it does, it’s neither googleable nor wikipediable. Maybe they meant the G-8?
•  FIRAF is googleable, but only seems to turn up in news reports of questionable veracity, whereas entering it in the – fallible, but rather comprehensive – reference website wikipedia, draws a blank.
•  An search for FIRAF does lead to this page of the US State Department, where this context is given:

 

“Since 2000, a forgery has circulated falsely claiming that the United States and the United Nations have assumed control of the Amazon rainforest in order to safeguard its treasures for all mankind.”

“The forgery purports to be page 76 of a U.S. sixth grade textbook titled An Introduction to Geography by David Norman. There is no indication that such a book exists. The U.S. Library of Congress, with more than 29 million books and other printed materials, has no record of it. The Online Computer Learning Center’s WorldCat database, the world’s largest database of bibliographic information with more than 47 million books, has no record of the book. Nor can such a book be found in Internet searches on amazon.com or Google.”

“To a native English speaker, the accompanying text’s many errors of spelling, grammar, and inappropriate tone and language are clear, although these would not necessarily be obvious to non-native English speakers. The words that are misspelled and some of the other most obvious errors are indicated in boldface. They are:”

 

• 3.000 should be 3,000; Americans use a comma, not a period to separate thousands from hundreds in numbers
• INT’L should be INTERNATIONAL; informal contractions would not be used in a textbook
• responsability should be spelled responsibility
• irresponsable should be spelled irresponsible
• authoritary should be authoritarian
• the “a” before “unintelligent” should be “an”
• destroying should be destruction
• vegetals should be vegetables
• calcule should be calculate
• cert should be certain
• explorate should be exploit. 

 

“In addition, the text uses an inappropriate tone and contains many other grammatical and word usage errors. Some of the spelling errors in the forgery indicate that the forger was a native Portuguese speaker. In Portuguese, the word for calculate is calcule, and a word for vegetable is vegetal. On June 8, 2000, the then-Brazilian ambassador to the United States, Rubens Antonio Barbosa, characterised the forgery as ‘disinformation made in Brazil by sectors still unidentified’.”

“Ambassador Barbosa added, ‘The initial source of the supposed news was a website associated with the slogan Brasil, Ame-o ou Deixe-o [Brazil: love it or leave it], but with no identification of those responsible for the website.’ The Minister-Counselor of the Brazilian embassy at the time, Paulo Roberto de Almeida, stated that the forgery was linked to Brazilian ‘right-wing sectors that specialize in transmitting news of supposed attacks against our sovereignty in a manner that is not merely paranoid, but also irresponsible’.”

“The Brazilian embassy in the United States has this statement on the forgery, in Portuguese, on its website. Although the textbook page has long been identified as a forgery, it continues to circulate widely via e-mail, and is often believed.”

Which is how it ended up in my mailbox…

215 – Montana, the Gorgeous Mosaic

 

In its issue of 22 April 1996, the New Yorker Magazine published a parody map of Montana, by cartoonist Roz Chast. The state ranks 4th in surface (after Alaska, California and Texas), but 44th in population, giving it the 3rd lowest population density (before Wyoming and Alaska). This desolation, coupled with its great natural beauty, endowed Montana with several nicknames, such as the ‘Treasure State’, the ‘Land of Shining Mountains’ and ‘Big Sky Country’. Most interesting, because of its ambivalence, is the ‘Last Best Place’.

This reflects on Montana’s spectacular Rocky Mountain landscapes, but also could be interpreted as meaning that the 1 million or so Montanans see the outside world as the Big Bad Wolf. Which is one of the insinuations of this not over-friendly big-city view of rural Montana – the title is decidedly sarcastic. Montana is portrayed as a quilt of mini-states run by disgruntled marginals: 

• Obsessed environmentalists
• Obsessed anti-environmentalists
• UFO buffs
• Militia groups
• Organised tax-dodgers
• Mad bombers
• Right-wing religious fanatics
• Macho writers, their hippie wives and their hippie children
• Hollywood pseudo-cowboys in need of privacy, open air, and a full-time personal staff of forty

I don’t really know enough about Montana to say whether there is any truth in this, but I guess the asinine tone of the labels reflects the prejudices of the ‘liberal, intellectual cosmopolitan coastal elite’ at least as much as it indicates those of the alleged fringe groups portrayed here – if not more.

This map was suggested to me by Wil Grewe-Mullins and is found here on Pruned, a blog on landscape architecture and related fields. A few people there commented on the veracity of the stereotyping in this map, which makes me wonder whether the New Yorker cartoon didn’t get it just about right:

• “The pseudo-cowboys should be down by Bozeman and the environmentalists should be by Missoula.”

• “I think I-5 goes right thru ‘anti-environmentalists’ and ‘organized tax dodgers’ – and I can attest to the truth of it! Stopping for gas in anything other than an old truck starts to get scary after a while.”

• “I would say the label ‘Hollywood pseudo-cowboys’ is true for the area around Kalispell (say the eastern half of that section) and I’d label the west part asbestos country: When I grew up, it was in the anti-environmental group. Bumper stickers of ‘Save a logger, eat a spotted owl’ were common. Right-wing religious fanatics can be found anywhere.”

214 - The Blonde Map of Europe

 

Q: How do you get a blonde out of a tree?
A: Wave

According to this map – and if you really believe that blondes have less brains –a nasty fall like that is more likely to happen in the central parts of Norway, Sweden and Finland, where at least 80% of the population is fair-haired, the highest figure in all of Europe.

This map, indicating the varying degrees of ‘blondness’ in Europe, shows how fair hair gets rarer further away from this core area – towards the south, as one intuitively might presume, but also towards the east, west and even towards the north.

The consecutive bands (coloured in such a way as to approximately represent the ‘average’ hair colour in each area) surrounding the core blonde area in Scandinavia in most cases don’t correspond with national boundaries, but could be taken to represent certain degrees of ethnic variation, often with a possible historical explanation.

• The highest percentages of fair-haired people can be found around the Baltic Sea (e.g. Denmark, the Polish coast and the Baltic states), making it in effect an almost entirely blonde-bounded lake. Only the German part of the Baltic coastline is remarkably un-blonde.
• Iceland was settled by mainly Norwegian colonists, and Icelanders still share the same degree of blondness with the largest part of Norway.
• The southern border of the fairer-haired part of Great Britain seems to correspond quite well with the southern border of the Danelaw, which was ruled and settled by the Danish in the early Middle Ages.
• The northern border of the 50-79% blonde area in Britain excludes the Highlands, perhaps indicating this was a refuge for the darker-haired Celtic people of Scotland.
• The darkest-haired part of France seems to correspond with those areas most heavily populated by its more ancient Gallo-Roman inhabitants, lighter-haired regions possibly reflect a later influx of Celts (in Brittany) and a more pronounced settlement of Frankish tribes of Germanic origin (in northern France and down towards Burgundy).
• Galicia prides itself on its Celtic heritage. Maybe this explains the relative blondness of that nort-west corner of Spain.
• The darker-haired area of Switzerland seems to correspond with the areas where Rhaeto-Roman and Italian are spoken.
• The blonder area in northern Italy might reflect a larger Germanic, Celtic and/or Slavic component of the local population, a similar area in the heel of Italy, way down south, is more of a mystery.
• A significant blonder-darker divide cuts through the Balkans, dividing Serbia in two (whilst Montenegro lands on the ‘blonder’ side of the border, and Kosovo on the ‘darker’ side).
• Romanian areas closest to the Hungarian border are equally blonde – many ethnic Hungarians live in Romania, possibly most of them closest to the border.
• Moldova, ethnically Romanian, is equally dark-haired.
• As is an adjacent part of the Ukraine, which for the largest part is as blonde as most of central and eastern Europe (all the way down to Georgia).
• The darker areas in Russia’s far north (the Kola peninsula) and further east (Siberia) are probably due to the prevalence of native, darker-haired peoples, e.g. the Saami (formerly referred to as the Lapps), who also account for the darker area at the very north of the Scandinavian peninsula.

I’ve no idea which year this map is from, but I suppose the larger mobility of people nowadays would make for a more diffuse distribution of hair colouration. Which dovetails nicely with this blonde joke:

Q: What did the blonde do when she heard that 90% of accidents occur around the home?
A: She moved.

The map was sent to me by Faluvégi Balázs from Hungary, and can be found here on eupedia.com, together with other interesting maps showing the distribution of eye-colour, religion, ethnicity, GDP per capita, legal age to purchase and drink alcohol and even the legal status of cannabis.