Abraham Simpson never explained what his problem with the Show-Me State was, but Homer’s cranky old dad did offer this reason for owning a 49-star American flag: “I’ll be dead in cold, cold ground before I recognize the state of Missourah!”

Is Abe’s vehement anti-Missourianism grounded in some true but obscure historical fact? I doubt whether Missouri’s very existence ever was the subject of such heated controversy – the only thing that comes close is the brief, bloodless Honey War, a border conflict with Iowa in 1838-’39.

Most probably, the quote serves to underline Abe Simpson’s senectitude, characterized by the obstinacy with which he launches into irrelevant old-geezer anecdotes. (“Not many people know I owned the first radio in Springfield. Weren’t much on the air then, just Edison reciting the alphabet over and over. ‘A!’ he’d say, then ‘B’. ‘C’ would usually follow.”)

As states go, Missouri is one of the more middle-of-the-road ones – or varied ones, if you prefer: it’s in the midwest, but has strong cultural ties to the south. St Louis is often called the ‘westernmost eastern city in the US’, Kansas City the ‘easternmost western city’. Missouri is a microcosm of the nation’s economy, demography and politics to the extent that it is considered a bellwether state – consistently voting for the winner in all US presidential races since 1904 (except 1956, when Missourians preferred Democratic candidate Adlai Stevenson over the eventual Republican winner Dwight Eisenhower).

Missouri is known as the Show-Me State, indicating its inhabitants’ reputation for skepticism for any but the most rational arguments. Its origin is ascribed to an 1899 speech by Missouri Congressman Willard Vandiver, declaring that “I come from a country that raises corn and cotton, cockleburs and Democrats, and frothy eloquence neither convinces nor satisfies me. I’m from Missouri, and you have got to show me.”

This map portrays Missouri as the Shred-Me State. It’s one of a series of maps of states, drawn as something else, by Frank Chimero, an illustrator and graphic designer, who says that “the illustrations for the states don’t necessarily have to deal the thematics of the state’s culture, it’s just a nice exercise for my creative muscles.”

Mr Chimero’s map captures well the only two areas on Missouri’s western and southern border that protrude from the other wise straight state lines. The torn edge of the paper sticking out at the top left represents the Platte Purchase, an area of 3,149 square miles (8,156 square km) forming the state’s northwest corner, acquired in 1836 and the only Missouri territory beyond the meridian at 94°36’’ longitude west.

At the bottom of the shredded page, the paper forms a straight line equivalent to the 36°30’ parallel north, also known as the Missouri Compromise Line, established in 1820 as the northernmost border of slavery in western territories. The same parallel forms most of the boundary between Virginia and Carolina, between Tennessee and Kentucky, and constitutes the northernmost border of Texas with Oklahoma. The only exception is the bit at the far right. This is Missouri’s Bootheel region, annexed at the instigation of planter J.H. Walker, who argued for the region’s inclusion in Missouri, sharing more affinity with Missouri’s Mississippi River towns than with Arkansas Territory. The Bootheel’s southern border is at 36° north.

The notable absence of Swiss people from the long list of explorers and discoverers might not just be due to the Alpine country’s lack of access to the sea. It also might just be that map-blindness is a national characteristic. It certainly appears so from this map of Swiss Airlines’s North American routes. “It’s hilariously wrong,” says Evan Sparks, who sent it in.

“In Florida, every city has magically migrated North. Tennessee also moved north, but Memphis replaced Chattanooga and Little Rock replaced Clarksville. The capital of Massachusetts is apparently Boston, Maine. Detroit is underneath Lake Huron, as is Pittsburgh with Lake Erie. Orange County has moved to Palm Springs. Portland and Sacramento have relocated inland, to the Harney Basin and the Great Basin, respectively.”

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.

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.

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’.

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.

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.

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).

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

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.